 | Some women's hearts |  |
FLEEING FROM FATE.
1. CHAPTER I.
ELIZABETH.
DUSK was settling down upon the great, roomy
house in which the Fordyces lived. It was a
May evening, but chill, with some lingering breath of
the vanished winter, and a bright fire was kindled in
the great open stove. A servant brought in lights, and
placed one on the centre-table, and another on the
mantel. They revealed the group in the room quite
clearly. A set of merry young people were these Fordyces,
— pure blondes, all of them, except one who
stood at the window, and who was not a daughter of
the house, though her name was also Fordyce.
Kate Fordyce was the eldest of the party, and besides
her there were two other sisters, and two brothers,
— all Saxon, and rosy, and merry. They were teasing
each other good-naturedly, laughing a great deal, and
saying a good many things which passed with them for
wit, because it takes so little in this respect to satisfy
those who are ready and waiting to be amused.
The girl at the window paid no heed to them. She
hills, where the rosy glow of the sunset still lingered.
A little at one side, as the window framed the landscape,
was her uncle's iron manufactory, from which a
red light streamed high, and sparkling cinders rayed
off and glittered through the dusk. She always liked
to look out of this window at this hour. The manufactory,
prosaic as it might be by daylight, gave to the
evening landscape a weird picturesqueness. Its mystery
allured, as well as its brightness. Then there were
the hills, — not the one on which the village of Lenox
stood, — but the distant, solitary ones, where free winds
blew, which wild birds haunted. Their aspect made
her sad, oftentimes; touched her to pain; and yet she
used to say that if her ghost could come back she knew
it would walk among those hills. To-night, however,
and a great many other times when she looked at them,
they seemed to her like prison-walls, shutting her in
from the world, — the world which must be somewhere,
and mean something besides woods, and slopes, and
waters, — the world which held excitements the thought
of which thrilled her pulses, triumphs which fired her
fancy, delights which haunted her dreams. Would she
ever, ever know any thing about it; or was Lenox to
be all her world?
She was not unhappy. Her feeling was not positive
enough for that. She was only beset by the longing
to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, — the
longing which is always the inheritance of an imaginative
youth.
No one in the Fordyce household was at all unkind
to Elizabeth. In a certain fashion they all loved her.
If there were an imperceptible dividing line between
them and her, it was she, not they, who drew it. For
they were not of her kind. Their father and hers had
been brothers, and certain family traits were reproduced
in them all. But this girl had taken something from
her mother which did not run in the Fordyce blood, —
a fine and keen imagination, a capacity to enjoy and to
suffer, of which they knew nothing. She was not heeding
now their merry nightfall talk. Her thoughts were
far away, tilting in some great tournament of life, living
in some other world of poetry, and passion, and
love, and woe.
She dared sometimes even to utter longing prayers
that a door might be opened into this world of her
dreams. It was almost the only prayer she ever said,
except the Lord's prayer, which she still repeated every
night as simply as a child. Of deep spiritual experiences,
of mental conflicts, she knew nothing as yet.
She guessed vaguely at her own capacity for emotion.
I am glad that I can show her to you once, while still
all her sorrows lay before her.
“What does Queen Bess say?” her Cousin Kate
asked at last, going up to her and breaking in upon her
revery.
“What about? I have not heard a word you have
been saying.”
She turned as she spoke, and her face fulfilled the
promise of her voice. To do that was something, for
but low, and clear, and tender. You felt that it
indicated a deep and thoughtful nature.
She was a tall, slight girl, this Elizabeth Fordyce,
whom her cousin called Queen Bess. She had dark
gray eyes, which sometimes seemed hazel, and sometimes
black. They were shaded by lashes so long that
they cast a shadow. Her complexion was clear, but not
fair. She had no color in her cheeks, except when some
strong emotion stirred her, and then a glow, deep and
warm as the heart of a summer rose, would suffuse
them. Her lips alone were bright always. Her head
was proudly set on her slender throat. Her hair was
soft, and dark, and abundant. Her features were not
faultless, but one who cared for her would never remember
to find fault with them. She had a low, womanly
brow; too broad, perhaps, for some tastes. Her mouth
was not small, but the bright, mobile lips expressed
every passing shade of feeling.
I have told you all this, and yet I am conscious that
I have given you no true conception of Elizabeth. I
can only trust to your learning to know her as my story
goes on. In those early days, when, as I said, all her
troubles lay before her, she neither understood herself,
nor was understood by any one else. Perhaps no one
loved her quite well enough to take the trouble of
studying her. Her individuality was too decided for
her to be generally popular. Nor had it even been the
fashion in Lenox to call her pretty. Her cousins —
with their full contours, their pink cheeks, and yellow
but no one meant to include Elizabeth when this phrase
was used. And yet she had a charm of her own for
those who had ears to hear and eyes to see. As she
turned to ask what her cousins had been talking about,
her eyes and cheeks brightened, and the Fordyce
blondes paled beside her.
Kate answered her, speaking in a pretty, eager way,
which seemed like a reminiscence of the time when she
was fifteen; but then she had been kept young by overmuch
petting, though she was twenty-four now, and
the eldest of the Fordyce sisters.
“We are talking about our May picnic. We must
have it on Thursday, or we can't, by any stretch of imagination,
call it May-day, for the month goes out on
that day. We were discussing the propriety of asking
Elliott Le Roy. He is boarding at the Gilmans, you
know.”
“But we have always said we never would ask any
of the summer boarders, — birds of passage, here to-day,
there to-morrow, and caring nothing for any of us.
For my part, I think the one charm of the May picnic
has always been that we had only Lenox people, who
had known about one another all their lives. I don't
like strangers.”
“You think you don't, I know; but there isn't one
of us who longs to see the world as you do. After all,
Mr. Le Roy isn't exactly a stranger. He belongs to us
and to Lenox in a certain way. He is a cousin of Uncle
Henry's new wife. It's very different, don't you see,
Aunt Julia's having settled here was what attracted
him to the place. He keeps house in New York, she
says, — has an elegant establishment, though he is a bachelor.
But he is an author, and he has so many associations
and engagements in the city that he couldn't
get on with his work there, and, as it was something
he was in a hurry to finish, he came here for the quiet.”
“An author!”
Elizabeth grew excited, though neither her face nor
her manner gave evidence of it. She was only eighteen
then, and full of enthusiasm; very young, too, of her
age, because she had lived so much in a world of fancy
and imagination, and known so little of the coarser realities
of actual life. To her dreaming soul an author
meant something a little less than divine, — a sort of
demi-god, to whom she could have offered incense like
a pagan.
“What does he write?” she asked, with suppressed
eagerness.
“Oh, political things, I believe, and essays on history.
I heard Aunt Julia say that he was a philosophical historian,
or a historical philosopher, I forget which. But
there's no doubt about his cleverness, any more than
about his money. She says he is a real man of the
world, too, — very fascinating to women, as it is, and
he might be very dangerous if he were not so cold. He
has never loved any one, and does not care to marry.
He is a good comrade, she says, and generous in a certain
way; but that comes of his brain, — his heart was
forgotten and left out when he was made.”
Long afterward Elizabeth remembered those words.
“I don't see why there should have been any question
about asking him,” she said, quietly. “Very likely he
will think the whole thing a bore; but his belonging to
Aunt Julia gives him a claim to the courtesy of an invitation.
For my part, I hope he'll come. I confess I
should like to see a real, live book-maker.”
Bell Fordyce, the second daughter, laughed merrily.
“There,” she cried, “you see Queen Bess is as very
a woman for curiosity as the rest of us. We will have
the picnic on Thursday, and we will ask the book-maker.
Dick, you must see about it to-morrow; and
you and Rob must give all the rest of the invitations.
We girls shall have enough to do in making our part
of the good things; for I don't suppose even authors
are above eating at a picnic.”
“Why haven't we seen this Mr. Le Roy before, since
he is a family connection?” Elizabeth interpolated,
pursuing, as her habit was, the subject which interested
her.
“Oh, he only came on Saturday. I suppose Aunt Julia
would soon have brought him round, or we should have
met him there, for I guess he goes to her house every
day; but now she will be as busy about the picnic as
we shall, and I suppose we shall see him first on the
shore of the Mountain Mirror.”
Then began a discussion about cakes and salads and
receipts; and Elizabeth turned back again to her window,
for in this direction no one expected any thing of
her. So she withdrew into herself, and began to fancy
would be like. How could people tell that he had no
heart? How unfair to pronounce such judgment when
they really knew nothing about it. Just because he
had never loved any one yet, — as if every line were
long enough to fathom a deep nature.
She was quite prepared to make a hero of him, and
hitherto she had known only book heroes. It was more
than twenty years ago, — I am writing in the year of
our Lord 1873, — and even then Lenox had begun to
be a tolerably well-known summer resort. But of the
people who came and went, the Fordyces, living at
some distance from the village, and taking no boarders,
saw very little. There were, among the stalwart Berkshiremen,
not a few in whom the elements of the heroic
were not wanting, — men of brains, and soul, and culture,
— but Elizabeth had seen them so often that she
had grown used to them, and so never paused to speculate
upon their possibilities. This new-comer represented
to her the unknown, which to a fine and fresh
imagination is always the admirable.
2. CHAPTER II.
AT THE MOUNTAIN MIRROR.
Thursday dawned clear and bright, — warmer than
any day of the month had been before, — a perfect
time. Elizabeth looked out of her window in a trance
had never seemed so fair, so full of promise. The
sky was a deep, lustrous azure, over which now and
then some bit of white, fleecy cloud drifted. Elizabeth
repeated snatches of verse to herself as she dressed.
She could not sing, but she recited in a chanting tone,
which was in itself full of musical suggestion.
She put on a pure white dress. Somehow she felt as
pure and fresh herself as the new day out of doors, —
the new day, washed with God's dews, and freshened
by His winds. She was as simply glad and expectant
as a child; so she suited her attire to her mood. She
brushed her soft hair away from her forehead, and
coiled it into a net, through whose slender meshes all
its beauty was visible. A branch of coral fastened the
lace around her throat, and was her only ornament.
She might have sat for a picture of Undine, but for the
soul, already awakened, which looked out of her
luminous eyes.
She went downstairs, and found the rest all ready
for it was nearly nine o'clock, — Rob and Dick Fordyce
in their cool, gray suits; Kate in violet, Bell in pink,
and Emmie, the youngest one, in sea-green; for the
three graces were prejudiced against dressing alike,
and they had been bright enough to discover that
azure is not of necessity the one idea of blondes.
They ate their late breakfast in a desultory way;
one and another jumping up at intervals, to put some
forgotten or neglected thing into the lunch-baskets.
About half-past nine they finally got themselves off
three seats of which held them all without inconvenience.
As the residences of the various guests were
scattered in different directions, no rendezvous was
attempted until they should reach the picnic ground.
I will not bore you with any attempt to make you see
the Mountain Mirror with my eyes. You may be fortunate
enough to go some day to a picnic in Lenox,
and behold with your own this deep, still tarn, which
reflects for ever the lofty peak that rises directly from
its western shore, the lesser hills at the east, and the
solemn, watching, cloud-swept sky high over all.
The Fordyce May picnic was held, year after year,
on this enchanted spot; and to climb the Peak, and
look from its summit over the wide-spread landscape,
was the fatigue which always earned them the right to
their repast. So they arranged at once, upon arriving,
baskets and hampers in a cool, shady place, and then
made ready for their mountain scramble. Presently
the rest of the company began to appear. Elizabeth
looked eagerly at the Gilman carriage, but found it
quite empty of interest for her, containing only Hannah
and Selina Gilman and their sandy-haired brother.
Half a dozen other well-laden wagons followed; and,
last of all, a light buggy, with a vicious-looking black
horse, driven by the only stranger of the party.
Elizabeth Fordyce sat very still in her place under
the trees, while her cousins went forward to welcome
Mr. Le Roy. She saw a tall, elegant-looking man,
dressed in speckless white linen, — a man with the unmistakable
her fancy. This hero, whose very name, before English
spelling corrupted it, was Le Roi, the king.
“A Saul, than his brethren higher and fairer,” she
said softly to herself; and just then her cousin Kate
brought him up to her.
“Another Miss Fordyce,” Kate said gayly; “my
Cousin Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth looked up, and met the gaze of a pair of
cool, speculative, yet reticent blue eyes, which told no
secrets and held no smile, though the lips below were
parted and revealed glittering rows of teeth. He was
very handsome,—that was her first thought; very satirical
also, was her second. He would be intolerant of sentimentality
or weakness, some instinct told her. Well,
she had one gift, that of being able to keep silence;
and she need not expose any vulnerable points to his
shafts. She rose with an air as lofty as his own, and
gave him her hand. That momentary contact sent a
curious thrill through her nerves, — not repulsion,
but as certainly not attraction, — prophecy, perhaps.
She did not try to analyze it as she sat down again,
and he passed on with his merry guide, to be made
acquainted with the rest of the party.
“See how he will let Kate bore him,” thought Elizabeth
to herself, “just because she is handsome. Good
and sweet as she is, she could have no comprehension
of such a man or such a career. How is it that,
even with the best men, beauty answers for every
thing?”
She forgot that her own face had not seemed unlovely
when she looked at it in the glass that morning.
She came nearer to envying her cousin's yellow locks,
and pink and white prettiness, and eyes of china blue,
than she had ever come before to a feeling so mean. She
really wanted this Elliott Le Roy to be interested in
her. Not that she was thinking of him as possible
lover or husband, — Elizabeth was too proud to have
such thoughts a spontaneous growth in her mind, —
but she wanted to attract him enough to make him
talk with her, and give her a taste of that wine of life
which he had quaffed so long that surely its tang must
linger upon his lips. If her eyes were not blue, or her
hair yellow, she had at least the ability to appreciate
him; but probably he would not care to find that out.
Just as she was becoming disgusted with herself for this
phase of envious feeling, he came back to her, quite
alone this time.
“They are getting ready to climb the Peak,” he said,
carelessly. “Do you go, — or shall we stay behind in
the shade, and let the rest look at the view for us?”
That “we” stirred Elizabeth's pulses a little. He
had elected himself her cavalier, after all. But her
calm, pale face betrayed no eagerness or excitement.
“I must go,” she said, rising. “They would not give
me my dinner, else.”
“And you expect to be hungry by and by?”
He eyed her critically as he spoke, beginning to
admire her composure and self-possession, — qualities
which he had expected to put to flight at once in
attention.
“Most unromantically hungry,” she answered, smiling,
“I always am on May-day.”
Le Roy lifted his brows.
“So this is May-day? I really thought that had
been a month ago, when I saw the streets full of young
Hibernians, with paper wreaths on their bare heads.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied quietly. “That was May-day
in New York. It takes most fashions a month to
travel to Lenox. It is too cold here for flowers to
bloom on the first of May, and we never call it May-day
until there are blossoms enough to crown our
queen. We always make a wreath of violets for Kate,
and they are less blue than her eyes.”
“Queen Katherine and Queen Bess, — I find myself
among the royal family.”
She did not answer. She fancied that she detected
a shade of satire in his tone, and it stung her sensitive
pride. By this time the rest of the party had all
started. The three graces had given up Mr. Le Roy
to Queen Bess very willingly. They were a little
afraid of him, and found themselves more at ease with
their village cavaliers. He had cut an alpenstock, as
he called it, for Elizabeth, and another for himself,
while they had been talking; and now they started for
the climb, just enough behind the others to be out of
ear-shot.
For a while they were both silent. Elizabeth carried
little of the small coin of society, and she was resolutely
perhaps, on account of her silence. She interested him
because she was so unlike the women to whom he was
accustomed; so doubly unlike any one whom he could
have expected to meet in Lenox. He was used to
have women strive to please him, offer perpetual incense
at his shrine, — but this girl was evidently indifferent
with an indifference which he could not believe to
be assumed. She was gathering flowers and leaves as
she went on, — a spray of dog-rose, a clump of violets,
a stalk or two of wild lilies of the valley, anemones, a
columbine, — he noticed the artistic grace with which
she grouped them. She walked with a free, grand
tread. Her voice was cool and clear, her accent perfect.
How had it all come? His wonder culminated
in a question.
“Were you born in Lenox, Miss Fordyce?”
“Born and bred,” — she answered, lightly, — “as
native a product of the soil as these violets. Indeed,
I have never been out of Berkshire county in my life.”
“And, I presume, do not care to go out of it, since
it has suited you so well?”
His eyes expressed the admiration which something
in her quiet self-respect forbade him to put into plainer
language. She smiled.
“There, at last, your penetration is at fault. I do
want very much to go away from Lenox. I should
want, when I am old, or tired of the world, to come
back here again, and die under these skies. I think I
could not rest quietly in my grave, unless I were
the mean time I do long to see something of life. I
was interested to meet you to-day, because you came
from the great world outside, and I fancied there would
be something of its atmosphere about you, making you
different from the men to whom I am accustomed.”
“And you are disappointed?” he asked; and then
waited for her slow-coming answer with an interest for
which he mentally scoffed at himself.
She looked at him thoughtfully and deliberately,
before she spoke.
“No, I do not think that I am. You are not just
what I fancied, but there is something about you which
is not of Lenox.”
He wondered in what respects he had failed to realize
her conception of him, — whether he were less than she
had thought, or more, — but he saw no encouragement
to ask the question in her quiet eyes; if indeed his own
pride had not stood as much in the way as her reserve.
Just then he registered a vow, mentally, that before
the summer was over he would know just what she
thought about him, just how much power he could
gain over her. The affair began, even in this early stage,
to interest him keenly.
Do not commit the error of fancying that his heart
was touched. His cousin had said, you know, that a
heart had been left out when he was made. However
that may have been, he certainly had not as yet developed
any sentiment for Elizabeth Fordyce; but his
curiosity was thoroughly aroused about her, and his
up in arms. Before the summer was over, not only
would he know her thoughts concerning him, but they
should be what he pleased to make them.
The encounter gave new zest to the prospect of his
summer campaign. He had planned to go to Newport
later in the season, after his literary work should be
accomplished; but there would be time enough for this
little innocent game of hearts before August.
Not a single throb of pity moved him, as he watched
this young, imaginative, fresh-hearted girl standing at
length on the summit of the Peak, and looking off
over the landscape, her dark eyes shining, and the
swift color of excitement staining her cheeks. He
began to think her really handsome, as he saw her now,
in contrast with her three cousins, whose beauty had
been so much more striking at first sight. They were
“well-blown,” as he phrased it to himself. The sun
had treated them as he usually does light-complexioned,
thin-skinned women. Their delicate little faces were
flushed and scorched, till they looked like full-blown
peonies; and there was an unpicturesque disarray
about their general get-up which certainly put them at
a sad disadvantage.
Queen Bess looked as cool as when she started. Her
white robes were unstained. The flowers in her hands,
even, were not withered. She stood there, looking off
towards the world she longed to try, with her wide
eyes and her glowing cheeks, — an incarnation, surely,
of pure-hearted, high-souled, graceful womanhood. And
through which she should pass before he had done
with her, as coolly, and analytically, and selfishly, as if
that fine, strong nature of hers had not held capacities
for joy and sorrow which he could no more comprehend
or measure than one could fathom the ocean with
a lady's ribbon.
The whole party went down the Peak in company,
after half an hour's restful enjoyment of the view. Mr.
Le Roy was thrown with Kate and Bell Fordyce; or
perhaps he let himself drift into their neighborhood
just to see if it would pique Elizabeth. It vexed him
a little to perceive that it did not. She was just as calm
and bright as when she had climbed up the height at
his side, — silent for the most part, as she had been then,
but with a face full of enjoyment, eager eyes which
swept the landscape, and yet with gentle words and
attentive air for every one who particularly addressed
her. “Wild thing, shy thing,” he called her to himself,
remembering a line of an old song. Would any one
ever tame her? Would she ever come and go at any
man's hest, — lay her heart in any man's hand? If so,
and he were not that man, it would be easy to hate him.
At the foot of the Peak she sat down again, and
began to make the violet-wreath for which they had all
been gathering blossoms, but for whose twining no
fingers were so deft as her own. Preparations for
dinner were going on. A fire was kindled amid difficulties
and laughter. A kettle was hung on some
crossed twigs, and girlish heads bent over baskets and
without offering his assistance, and then lazily sauntered
over to Elizabeth.
“So you don't help to get dinner?” he asked her.
“No, my part is to make the wreath, and arrange
the flowers for the vases. I always put out fires when I
try to kindle them; and I think I can't be one of the
wicked, for whatever I do does not prosper, in a domestic
line, at least.”
“I think you could kindle some fires that many
waters could not quench, neither could the floods
drown,” Le Roy said, slowly, watching her cheeks
for a blush which did not come.
“Could you get me some water from the spring for
these vases?” she asked, trying her flowers into one of
them, so coolly that he could not tell whether she had
comprehended him.
“Don't send me away for cold water,” he said, pathetically.
“I get enough of that here.”
Elizabeth laughed.
“Oh, you must do something as well as the rest, if
you want your dinner. Kate is Queen bee, and she
won't allow any drones in the hive.”
“Cruelty, thy name is Miss Fordyce!” he sighed,
with a dramatic air; but he took a pitcher and brought
her the water, notwithstanding. When he came back
she made a diversion by filling her vases and putting
them on the table; and then the crown must be adjusted
to Kate's golden head; and by that time dinner was
ready.
For the hour or two after the feast fate was unkind
to Mr. Le Roy. He had no opportunity to get Queen
Bess to himself; and he was one of those men for whom
nothing is so stupid as a general conversation. He revenged
himself on fate by doing his utmost to disturb
the peace of mind of Miss Emmie, the youngest Fordyce,
by pouring into her ear the most absurd and
unmitigated flatteries, which she swallowed just as
children a little younger do candy, regardless of whence
it comes, but with eager and unsophisticated delight in
its sweetness. He soon tired of this too easy game,
and managing to get the ear of his cousin, Mrs. Henry
Fordyce, the most carelessly good-natured of matrons,
he asked in an undertone, — “Jule, would it be any
harm for me to invite one of those Fordyces to drive
home with me?”
Mrs. Henry considered a moment. “I don't believe
it would,” she said at length. “To be sure you never
saw them till to-day; but they are my nieces, and you
are my cousin. No, I don't see any harm.”
Of course Elizabeth was the “one of the Fordyces”
whom Mr. Le Roy had in his mind, and wanted to have
in his wagon. He went up to her, armed with her
aunt's approval.
“I wonder if you would have confidence enough in
my skill as a whip to trust me to drive you home?”
he asked, adroitly, as if he were suggesting the only
possible objection to his arrangement. “I spoke to
Julia about it, and she thought you would be safe
enough. She has sat behind my horse two or three
afraid.”
Miss Fordyce considered a moment. It was not
quite the thing, even in primitive Lenox, to drive
with a gentleman so nearly a stranger; but then he
was her aunt's cousin, and he was an historical philosopher,
or a philosophical historian, she had not found
out which yet, but she wanted to find out. Yes, she
would go.
They started a little earlier than the rest, for they
found they were agreed in disliking to take other people's
dust; and it would be equally objectionable to
lead the cavalcade, and inflict on simple-hearted followers
the annoyance they shirked for themselves. So
they solved the problem by starting half an hour in
advance of the time appointed; and though they took
the longest way home, and made a considerable detour
even from that, they were standing at the Fordyce
gate, and quite ready to welcome the three Graces on
their arrival.
Soon after they set out, Elizabeth plucked up courage
and asked Mr. Le Roy about his books. He saw
the eager light in her eyes, and smiled secretly. So it
was as an author that she was interested in him. That
might answer for the world, but he chose to make his first
impression upon her in his private capacity as a man.
He answered carelessly, — “My books are not books
at all. The papers I am writing now may possibly be
put into book form some time; but the Bostonians are
to have the benefit of them first in the shape of lectures
the history of a certain epoch. For the rest, I've only
written articles for the monthlies and quarterlies, and a
lecture now and then. Did Cousin Julia delude you
into thinking me an author, and so make all Lenox
ready to be shy of me in advance?”
“I don't know about the delusion. She certainly
said you were an author, — at least Kate told me so, —
and I cannot see any thing incorrect in the statement,
according to your own showing. I suppose Addison
was none the less an author because his best energies
were given to a daily paper.”
“Oh, if you are going back into the classics, I cry
quarter. I foresee I shall find you too clever for me.”
A smile flickered round his lips as he spoke, which
vexed Elizabeth and made her silent. She was willing
enough to be laughed with, but it would not be easy
to win her forgiveness for man or woman who should
laugh at her.
They bowled along for a little while under green
trees over the still country road. Le Roy had understood
her silence, and was thinking how to redeem himself.
Presently he said, with a complete assumption of
frankness, — “I vexed you just now, but you vexed me
first. My ideal is so high that I feel myself a tyro, and
it sounds like satire when any one talks to me of authorship.
Let us cry quits and begin again. I have seen
some really great men. When I was in England I
heard Robert Browning talk, and Tennyson. Which
do you like best?”
“I don't know. I think I should say Browning; and
yet Tennyson has written two verses which move me
more than almost any others in the language.”
“What are they?”
He asked the question in a quiet, matter-of-fact way,
and she answered it as simply as if she had not been a
young girl, talking to a man whose fascinations had
already proved too much for many a woman's peace:—
Not fail beneath my feet,
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
“Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me,
Before I am quite, quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may,
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.”
“Jove, how that girl could love!” Le Roy said to
himself, listening to the quivering voice, watching the
changeful color. “I should like to see how she would
look when once her whole nature was waked up.”
When her voice died on the air, which seemed to
hold the echo of its melody a moment after the last
word was spoken, he looked at her steadily, till the
clear eyes drooped.
“You are tempting fate with that prayer, Miss Fordyce.
I see the rose of dawning. But you are cool of head,
if warm of heart, and I think you will not go mad.”
She did not answer. His longing to tame this “wild
thing, shy thing,” was growing on him. I wish Elizabeth
had had a mother just then to say a prayer for
her happiness; for Elliott Le Roy was a man pitiless as
death, and what he longed for he generally attained.
3. CHAPTER III.
A COSTLY EXPERIMENT.
Mrs. Henry Fordyce looked out of her window the
forenoon after the picnic, and saw her handsome elegant
cousin sauntering in at her gate. She was weak enough
to feel a little pride in her relationship with him, — in
his talents, his breeding, his good looks, his grand air,
his magnificence, generally speaking. She knew that
half Lenox was envying her her kinship with him; and
few things are more delightful to a naturally constituted
woman than those which tempt her erring sisters to
break the tenth commandment. She received her visitor
with impressment.
“I looked for you, Elliott. I thought you were sure
to come and tell me how you liked Lenox.”
“What I thought of your husband's nieces, you
mean,” he corrected her, with a smile which held a
little covert satire.
“Well! if you choose to put it in that way. I saw
that you drove Elizabeth home. Don't you think the
others handsomer?”
“Yes, I suppose so, if they weren't such duplicates
of each other. I like individuality.”
“They are a good deal alike. People call them `the
three Graces,' you know, — or `the handsome Fordyces.'
When they say those things, of course they don't include
Elizabeth.”
“Does that hurt her feelings?”
“How absurd. Would she say so if it did? But
really I doubt if she cares, she is so full of her daydreams.”
“And the others are not dreamers, — real blue and
gold, flesh and blood. Jule, it is warm, and I am lazy,
— just in the humor for gossip; which, after all, men
like quite as well as women, if only the subject is interesting.
So let me lie back here in this great easy-chair,
and you tell me about Elizabeth Fordyce. She
has excited my curiosity, just because she is so unlike
the rest of them. How is it that she hasn't the family
beauty?”
“Why, you see her mother was a Nugent, and that's
where the dark eyes and hair, and the reserved, dreaming
temperament come from. She's very like a picture
I've seen of her mother. There's but little Fordyce
about her, poor thing.”
“It is unlucky, if her face is her fortune; but perhaps
she has money?”
“Not a dime of her own. I've heard rumors since I
but Henry wont talk about it. You see her father
and the uncle she lives with were in business together,
and just after her father's death there was some embarrassment
about money matters, and the firm came near
being insolvent. So it was made out, somehow, that
no money was to come to her; but then her uncle took
her home, and has done by her just the same as by his
own children; so, after all, there is no fault to be
found. They've all been good to her, only I don't
think they understand her very well. They say she's
queer.”
“I suppose she likes her life?” he asked, with secret
curiosity.
“I don't quite know. She was eighteen last spring,
and Kate told me that she had been restless ever since
to get away and do something for herself. She would
have gone before now, only that her uncle was so opposed.
But she has been studying with all her might
to fit herself to go as a governess at the first good
opening.”
Elliott Le Roy smiled at the thought of some of Elizabeth's
cool, little ways, and crisp, curt speeches. The
governess element did not appear to him to be very
strongly developed in her character. Having found out
all he wanted to know, he got up lazily.
“What, you are not going?”
“Yes, I'm afraid I must. It's a bore, rushing round
in the sun, and you know, Jule, how I like to sit in
your cool, quiet parlor; but I must not quite forget all
me to inquire about the health of the Fordyces after
their picnic.”
As he walked along, however, it was only one of the
Fordyces of whom he thought, and that one, Elizabeth.
He had said to himself, yesterday, “How that girl could
love!” and he was curiously tempted to try the experiment
of making her in love with himself. He fancied
her petulant little ways; her pretty insubordinations;
the shy sweetness of her rare and hard-won tenderness;
and then the triumph of her full and free surrender.
Once it came across his mind that it wouldn't be so
very bad a thing to marry her. If he married at all, it
must be a woman who would not fetter him, — who
would demand little, and take what he gave, thankfully.
He had bachelor ways, single-man tastes, which he
would not be willing to sacrifice to any one. A girl in
his own set, well posted as to her dues, would not be
satisfied with any such half conquest. But this “wild
thing, shy thing,” would she not be easy to content,
once that a man had tamed her? If some one were to
save her from her governessing career, and surround
her with elegance and luxury, how gratitude would
deepen and sweeten her love.
That reflection, by the way, showed how little he
really knew of women. Gratitude and love run in
parallels. There may be room for both in the same
heart, but they never touch, nor do I see how one can
deepen the other.
Mr. Le Roy laughed, a cynical little laugh, all to
of his revery at the same time. After all, what did he
want of a girl with whom he certainly was not in love, —
who, at best, would be more or less of an incumbrance?
Still, it was only Miss Elizabeth Fordyce for whom he
asked at the door; though the rest might be supposed
to hold equal claims upon his courtesy.
He was shown into a little room which, by tacit
consent, had been abandoned to Elizabeth. It was
furnished with quaint, old-fashioned furniture, which
had been her mother's. A bookcase, well filled, was
one of its adornments. Ivy-vines had been trained
over the windows, into leafy cornices for the soft, white
muslin curtains. The few chairs were all easy-chairs.
The windows were open, but Elizabeth had a Southern
temperament, and liked warmth, so there was a little
grate with a tiny soft-coal fire, clear and bright; and,
near the fire, her delicate cheeks flushed by its glow,
sat Elizabeth. She had no means to make expensive
toilets, but she had the tact to make effective ones. Her
dress was white, with violet ribbons; and a violet
odor floated out from her filmy handkerchief. Her eyes
kindled when she met Mr. Le Roy, and then drooped
again; and her visitor took in the whole picture, —
room and furnishings, and graceful woman, — and
scoffed at Lenox for not having found out, before
this, who was the handsome Fordyce.
The shy eagerness of her welcome charmed him.
He sat down beside her, and began to talk to her about
some of the books lying on her table. He found that
of his ability made her diffident of expressing her
own ideas. Once or twice, however, she flashed into
passionate earnestness. Once was when he took up a
volume of Goethe.
“So you like the grand old German?” he said.
“Like him!” The dark, gray eyes flashed, the cheeks
flamed. “Mr. Le Roy, I hate him!”
“I presume you do not question his genius?”
“The more genius, the more shame!” she cried, hotly.
“A man that could coolly go to work to win one
woman's heart after another, just to see how love
would affect each different type, and then throw them
away like squeezed oranges. I try to think good will
always triumph over evil, in the end; but I have often
wondered whether there were soul enough in that man
to be worth saving. Mind he had plenty of; but it is
not mind to which the saving promise of immortality is
given.”
“So you think trifling with a woman's heart is the
unpardonable sin?”
“I don't know,” she said, slowly. “God forbid that
I should pronounce any soul's sentence. Still, I know
but one worse crime in a man than winning a woman's
heart for pastime.”
“What is that? Your code of morals interests
me.”
“To marry a wife without loving her,” she answered,
in a still, controlled voice, but with cheeks and eyes
aflame. “When a woman found herself trifled with
day and chance for happiness might not be quite over,
— for, romance about it how we may, women, and men
too, do sometimes love more than once. But, deceived
into a loveless marriage, what is there for the wife
to do but to die? I think I could never forgive that
wrong on earth or in Heaven.”
“How if a woman marries a man without loving
him?”
“She wrongs him, surely; and her own soul yet
more. But the cases are not parallel. Love is not so
vital to a man; and, besides, I firmly believe that any
husband who has married a wife with a free heart can
win her love if he tries.”
“Your experience must have been very limited; how
have you formed your theories of life?” he asked her,
wonderingly.
“They are only theories, as you say. I cannot tell
how they would stand contact with actual life. But
they were strong enough to make me hate Goethe.”
She rounded her sentence with a smile, and then
took up some delicate sewing, and began stitching on
it, as if she considered the discussion finished.
Mr. Le Roy drew “Men and Women” from his
pocket, and opened it first to “Evelyn Hope;” that
hopefullest poem of love and woe which poet ever
penned. Afterwards he turned a few pages to the
“Toccata of Galluppi's,” and read it through. Two
lines stayed with Elizabeth, and kept her company
long after he had bidden her good-morning, and gone
away, —
Death came tacitly, and took them where they never see the sun.”
Would her life come to nothing? Was she one of
the “butterflies” to “dread extinction”? Her existence,
just then, seemed laid upon her as a burden, not
given her as a blessing.
Elliott Le Roy went out again into the June sunlight.
He was becoming singularly interested in
Elizabeth; but it was precisely in the Goethe fashion
of wishing to try experiments with her.
“It would almost pay to marry her,” he said to
himself, with his cool little laugh, “just to see what
kind of wife she would make. She talked desperately
and defiantly enough, but she would be very submissive,
I think, when she couldn't help herself. It's the
way with these high-mettled, true-blooded creatures,
whether horses or women. Once well-broken to harness,
and there's no end to their faithfulness and
submission. I'd trust her. But she wouldn't give away
that heart of hers in a day.”
He walked on, switching off dandelion-heads with
his light walking-stick. Lenox was more exciting than
he had expected. Perhaps he could not make Elizabeth
care for him, even if he tried; but at that thought he
smiled a little scornfully to himself. He had found
women so far very easy to win, though he had won
them not to wear, hitherto. So far in life he had loved
and ridden away; but curiously enough he did not for
a moment contemplate pursuing this course with Elizabeth.
must pay the legitimate price for his triumph. Nor
did this prospect very much trouble him. Partly because
— come how those things may — she was so essentially
thorough-bred that he could trust her to be equal
to any position in which he might place her; and
partly — though this was unacknowledged to himself —
because even his Mephistophelian nature was not
wholly free from the human longing to be loved, to
have one human creature to say a prayer for him if he
were in peril, or drop a tear for him if he were dead.
I think, too, that even this man of the world would
not have been quite bold enough deliberately to
resolve on trifling with such a “being of spirit, and
fire, and dew,” as Elizabeth.
Still, whether in the character of trifler or man in
earnest, he went day after day to the Fordyce dwelling.
He read to Elizabeth, and talked to her. The country
ways learned to know his horse's footsteps, and the people,
for a radius of ten miles round the village, grew
familiar with the handsome, haughty face of the horse's
master, and the slight, dark-haired girl beside him.
Elizabeth's soul was in a strange tumult. All of life
had become savorless to her except the hours when he
was beside her; and yet with him she was never quite
happy or at ease. She wished in one breath that she
had never seen him; while in the next she shivered at
the thought of what Lenox would be when summer and
he had taken flight together.
“Do you love me, Elizabeth?”
He asked her this one day, in a half-reckless mood;
piqued to do it, perhaps, by her inscrutable self-possession.
It was six weeks after the picnic, — six weeks
during which there had not been a single day when
they had not met. In August he was to go to Newport;
and now it was the middle of July. They had
been talking of this, and it had seemed to her as if something
tight round her heart were strangling it. She
sat silent, because she had not self-control enough to
speak calmly; and into this silence his question fell, —
“Do you love me, Elizabeth?”
She grew very pale, and her voice shook as she answered,
— “God help me, I do not know. I never cared
for any one else, and I don't want to part with you;
but I had thought love was something more, or different.
Can't you help me to understand myself, Mr. Le Roy?”
The soft pleading in her eyes moved him. Her helplessness
was so appealing, her voice so faltering, her
face so pale and sweet, that Elliott Le Roy came
nearer to loving her in that moment than ever he had
before. He took her close into his arms, and kissed
her, — a long, silent kiss, — his first. He felt something,
but I think he feigned more; for his was a nature to
which shams fitted themselves as a garment.
“I think you do love me, Elizabeth. Is it not so?”
With his eyes and lips on hers, the whole magnetism
of his nature swaying her towards him, she answered
under her breath, — “If you care for my love, Mr. Le
Roy, I think you can keep it.”
And in saying this she told him neither more nor less
cared for her love, it would never have failed him.
She did not yet know herself; but he had all things in
his favor. He satisfied her pride, — he fulfilled the demands
of her taste, — her heart might easily be his by
right of discovery, if he chose to enter in and take possession.
Would he choose?
For a moment a vague longing for the possible sweetness
there might be in a true love, a true home, came
over him, and his manner was very tender.
“Shall I be a grand dame enough for your sphere in
life?” Elizabeth asked humbly.
“If I had not thought my rose perfect, should I have
tried to gather it?” he said in answer. “There are
other flowers in other gardens, — I have chosen here.”
He had not said one word about his love for her, but
Elizabeth had not noticed the omission. Nor had he left
such words unsaid from any conscientious scruples, any
doubts of himself, but simply because they did not come
naturally to him. He was not an affectionate man;
and just here was the reef on which, had all her skies
been fair, all her winds favoring, Elizabeth was sure,
soon or late, to come to woe.
Underneath all her delicate shyness, her nature was
tenderly affectionate, and, where she deeply loved, very
demonstrative as well. She would never have wearied
of the manifestations of affection; while to be fond and
caressing, or even to endure such things patiently for
any length of time, was not in Le Roy's mental constitution.
was sure to keep her from wearying any man with unsought
caresses; but it offered her no security against
that hunger of the heart of which one dies at last, just
as surely as of bodily famine.
The time for discovering this lack had not yet come,
and she fancied herself very happy as she sat at Le
Roy's side, and heard him tell how she had interested
him from the first. Nor was he insincere in this talk.
If I have given you the impression that he was a man
with no good qualities, no tender human feeling, no
respect for moral obligations, I have failed to render
him to you fairly. The trouble about correctly understanding
people is that there are no pure temperaments;
no one is altogether bad or altogether good. The bad
preponderates fearfully in some natures; but no man is
left to live on earth when he is quite a devil, or fails of
translation when he is all a saint.
Sitting beside Elizabeth, in those first hours after he
had won her, Le Roy certainly felt a tenderness for her,
a real interest in her, which he had never experienced
for a woman before. It was far enough from the grand,
self-sacrificing devotion of a nobler man; but it was the
best he had to give, — let us do him justice.
As for Elizabeth, thinking of her in those hours, one
wishes over again that she could only have had a pure,
wise, good mother. Poor child! She was not in one
sense ignorant. She had read and thought in her way,
and framed her fine-spun theories; but she knew so
sadly little of her own heart.
And this engagement was but the type of half those
formed by young girls of eighteen the country over.
They do not guess what true love is or should be, —
they mistake for it their first heart-flutter, — they do
not comprehend their own natures, or divine what they
will need when they come to the full stature of their
womanhood; and yet they are very honest, and mean
all they say when they utter, in their ignorance, that
solemn vow which neither Heaven nor man could help
them to keep, until Heaven or man should be able to
make the sun move back on his course, or the streams
flow upwards towards the mountain tops.
4. CHAPTER IV.
HER MANACLE.
The next day, after the understanding arrived at in the
last chapter, was Thursday; and Mr. Le Roy started
for New York in the morning. Friday afternoon, the
last train brought him back again, and he went over in
the gloaming to see Elizabeth. She trembled a little
when he came to her side. It gave her a curious feeling
to meet again, after his brief absence, this man, in
whose hands her future lay. The agitation of her
manner made him think of the fluttering of some newly
caught woodland bird. He called her again, in his
thought, his “wild thing, shy thing,” and experienced
in her capture.
“Did you know you were to wear my fetter?” he
asked after a while. “I went to New York partly for
the purpose of providing myself with a manacle for
your securer binding.”
“I think I shall not want to run away if you are
good to me,” she said, in a low, shy tone.
“And I, you see, do not mean you shall run away,
whether or no. I shall hold on to you like Fate.”
He laughed as he spoke; but he and she, in those
two sentences, had unconsciously struck the key-note
of their two lives.
The ring he put upon her finger was the conventional
diamond solitaire, but unusually large and brilliant,
for Le Roy was rich, and not niggardly. Elizabeth
had the intense love for beautiful things, which inheres
in such temperaments as hers; but the ring, handsome
as it was, gave her a singular feeling of discomfort. It
seemed to watch her, like a great, fiery eye. She felt
as if, in some subtle, inexplicable way, that eye were
her keeper. She was never quite the same self-willed,
independent girl after she wore it. It was as though,
like a conquered fort, she had given up her defences, and
hung out now the colors of the enemy. Not that she
allowed these thoughts any room in her consciousness.
She imagined herself very happy indeed, only some
occult influence had changed her from her old self.
Perhaps, as the days went on, Le Roy may have felt
this subtle change. At any rate, the two weeks which
Some sauce piquante was wanting. He was
precisely one of those men, to whom the chief charm
of any object consists in the winning of it, — once his,
it was apt to pall upon his fancy. For six weeks past
there had been a certain kind of excitement about long
morning sessions in Elizabeth's little parlor, listening to
and drawing out her quaint fancies and crude theories,
afternoon rides behind his high-stepping horse, and
evening lingerings under moon and stars, amid falling
dew, and air heavy with summer odors. But now, that
all these things were orthodox, and he knew that it
was expected of him to pass a good share of his days at
Elizabeth's side, he began to grow tired of it all. He
thought of the little girl in Sydney Dobell's song, who
asked, —
Or did I dream she was brighter before?”
on the head for expressing his idea so well. Still, he
contrived to satisfy all Elizabeth's demands, — partly,
perhaps, because she knew so little of the ordinary
ways of love and lovers. Then, too, her nature was
generous, and not exacting. Moreover, she had logical
foundation for an entire faith in him. She had
neither fortune nor social influence, nor did she think
herself in the least handsome. She thought, therefore,
that the love which had sought her out, in spite of all
these disadvantages, must be deep, if silent. So she
went on, fancying herself altogether happy; but something
was quiet and submissive to an authority, recognized, if
new; and, after all, the tamer had nothing to tame. It
was a household bird, which came and went at his
call, and wore his manacle willingly, but he could not
fancy her his “wild thing, shy thing,” any more.
One day, in the first week of August, he stopped at
his Cousin Julia's on his way to Elizabeth.
“I am off for Newport to-morrow, Jule,” he said,
when she came into the room, “and I thought I'd look
in on you a few moments before I went away.”
“Are you off with Elizabeth?”
“No; without her.”
“You know what I mean, — is it all over between
you?”
Le Roy laughed. “Oh, no; it is all impending. I
want to be married the last of October. I hate bridal
tours, and all similar exhibitions of one's self to the
million; so I want the wedding just when it will be
pleasant to go back to town. Elizabeth will have
enough to do in the mean time, and there is no reason
why I shouldn't have my usual five or six weeks at
Newport.”
Mrs. Henry Fordyce looked at him for a silent moment;
then she said, with an expressive lift of her eyebrows,
— “Upon my word, you are a cool lover. But
Queen Bess can't blame me, whatever comes. I told
the Fordyces, before they ever saw you, that your
heart was left out.”
“If that be true of me, you will at least acknowledge
that I should dance perpetual attendance upon her.
Elizabeth knows little of the ways of the world; and,
thank God, she is neither exacting nor demonstrative.”
“Neither exacting nor demonstrative, is she? Elliott,
I quite understand the estimate you put upon my
penetration; but, trust me, if that is your opinion, I
know Elizabeth Fordyce better than you do.”
A sarcastic smile crossed Le Roy's lips, but he suppressed
it before it had time to rouse his cousin's ire,
and said, with the air of one willing to listen to reason,
— “You may be more than half right; but at any
rate, the thing is done, and I came this morning to ask
your aid towards its being well done. If I have sometimes
questioned your penetration, you know I have
never questioned your taste. The future Mrs. Le Roy
will not be a woman of fashion; but some society she
must see, and I am unwilling to be mortified by her
toilets. You have lived in New York so long that
you will understand just what she ought to have. I
want you to help her with her preparations. Suppose
you go down with her next week, and arrange about
dressmakers, and the like. I will give you some blank
checks, and you must see that she has every thing
which she needs.”
“But how will Elizabeth like this supervision?”
“I will make that all right with her. Of course
I don't mean that her taste is to be set aside in the matter;
only you must tell her what and how much she
requires, and make sure that she has it.”
Elizabeth swallowed a little pang at the announcement
of her lover's approaching departure. She did
not speak just at first, but he saw a quiver of pain flutter
round her sensitive mouth, and I think he was
human enough not to be sorry that she would regret
him.
“I thought you understood all that, dear,” he said,
kindly. “My plans have been made for this sojourn at
Newport from the first. I am to meet a party of friends
there. It was an arrangement before I left New York.
It will give you all the more time for your preparations.
The last of October I want to take you home.”
“My preparations will not be much,” she said, a red
spot burning on either cheek.
“But I want them to be a good deal. Mrs. Le Roy
will not be shut up in a convent, and I want her
properly made ready for presentation to her husband's
friends. I have been talking to Julia about it this
morning. She will go to New York with you, and
help you shop. To save you trouble, I have left the
sinews of war in her hands, and she will see to all the
bills.”
“But, Elliott,” — she called his name very timidly,
for she had not spoken it often, — “I don't like you
to do this. I should feel so much happier if you would
just let me have what my uncle chooses to give me,
until — afterwards.”
He silenced the pleading lips with a kiss.
“I want you to be prepared for afterwards,” he said,
resolutely, though not unkindly. “If you are ready to
life, surely you need not oppose my pleasure in this
trifle.”
She looked at the great diamond eye glittering on
her finger, — her manacle. The color came and went
in her cheeks. She shut her lips firmly to keep them
from betraying her by their quivering. Her eyes grew
moist. A tenderer, more generous man would have
understood her well enough to spare her this humiliation;
but Elliott Le Roy was not tender, or in any
large sense generous, and he silently waited for her
acquiescence. She did not venture to blame him, even
in her heart. He did not know how she felt, and of
course it was not to be expected that he would. And
perhaps, after all, he had a certain right to make sure
that she would not mortify him. So she said at last,
very quietly, — “I will give up my own will in the
matter to yours, and do as you and Aunt Julia tell me;
but I wish you had not desired this thing.”
He ignored the last part of her sentence altogether,
and only thanked her for being such a good, sensible
little girl, just as he had felt sure she would be, when
she came to consider.
After all, the weeks of his absence passed quickly.
It was not in the heart of woman, least of all such a
beauty-loving woman as Elizabeth, not to be interested
in all the elegant things which were purchased so
lavishly for the future Mrs. Le Roy. Nor, indeed, was
she quite enough in love to have her lover's absence
take away all the brightness from her life. She understood
lack in her experiences; but there were depths in her
nature which Elliott Le Roy, let him love her never so
well, could not have sounded. And yet, if he had
loved her generously and fondly, she would have gone
through life beside him, and he would never have
lacked any thing in her eyes. It is almost always easy
for even a man, who is not the right man, to hold a
woman's heart, if he will but love her enough.
Twice a week Le Roy wrote to her, and she was
very proud of his letters. They were not love-letters,
though he always addressed her as the one to whom his
future belonged; but they were very brilliant letters,
full of wit, and observation, and satire. She was proud
that he should thus give her of his best; and her
answers, though she was not vain enough to perceive
it, paid him back his own coin with usury. Elizabeth,
in her modesty, had never understood her own
capacities; but Le Roy began to discover, during this
correspondence, that it would be in her power to dispute
the bays with him on his own ground, if she chose.
Early in September he came to see her for a day, and
admired the progress of her trousseau, delighting Mrs.
Henry Fordyce with his unqualified approval. He
gave her at this time a second commission, — bridesmaid
dresses of the loveliest blue silk for the “three
Graces.”
“Not white?” she asked; for colored dresses were
less in vogue for bridesmaids then than they are now.
“Decidedly not white,” he answered. “White is
her, and it is my fancy to have my pearl set in turquoise.”
Elizabeth opened her gray eyes a little wider when
he told her that his absence was to be still farther
prolonged. He was going to the White Mountains
with the same friends whom he had joined at Newport.
She did not utter a word in opposition; but he answered
the unspoken protest in her eyes.
“You are busy, my Queen, and I should only be in
your way. Besides, you know these are my last months
for enjoying myself en garçon.”
She looked at him gravely. “Am I to be a burden
to you, Mr. Le Roy, — to stand in the way of your
enjoyment?”
“Not at all, foolish girl; only to change its nature a
little, perhaps;” but he thought to himself as he
spoke, that even this last was extremely unlikely to
happen.
So he went away again, and the preparations went on.
He extended his trip into Canada, and was gone a
week or two longer than he expected. Then there
were arrangements to be made in New York for the
reception of the bride in her new home; so that somehow
October was over before a positive time could be
fixed for the wedding; and it came off at last, on a
November morning, gloomy and despondent, which of
itself seemed to Elizabeth's imagination to presage ill.
The “three Graces,” having made their own toilets
at an earlier hour, assisted at the bride's, by their presence
had set most of the stitches in the white robes, put them
on. Elizabeth stood up at last, fair and pale as a snow
image, with a wonderful radiance of shimmering silk
and falling lace about her. Mr. Le Roy came to look
at her before her uncle took her to church; his most
gallant, debonair self, on this occasion, quite ready to
pay her compliments.
“Am I all right?” she asked him, a little anxiously.
“If the other Queen Bess had been a tithe as fair
she would never have died unwedded. But you look
like a wraith, — unreal, illusive. Will you `slip like a
shadow, a dream, from my hands'?”
“Not now,” she answered. “If you should tire of
me, by and by, who knows what I would do?”
“Well, at least you shall wait for that,” and then he
took her in his arms, and kissed her for the last time as
Elizabeth Fordyce. Did his kiss lack any thing, or did
some secret whisper of destiny make itself heard just
then in her soul? She clung to him an instant, in a
strange passion of emotion; was it regret for the well-known
past, or dread of the untried future, — who
knows? She only said, — “I shall have no one in the
whole world an hour hence but you. God help us if
we are making a mistake!”
Elizabeth Le Roy came out of the church, where
she had stood, a pale pearl, among her cousins,
brave in blue and gold and in thier young, strong,
healthy beauty, whose brilliance no sentimental sorrows
as she had been for so many years. She came out,
leaning on her husband's arm, and the keen, penetrating
November air seemed to strike to her heart
with a sudden chill.
She had speculated sometimes, as what girl does not,
in her dreaming girlhood, about her wedding morning;
but somehow her fancies had never been any thing like
this reality. Still she tried to believe that she was not
only very prosperous, but very happy.
Mr. Le Roy, wealthy, elegant, critical, had chosen
her, — her, out of the world full of women he knew.
He was going to take her from the stillness and inaction
of which in those long, dreamy years her very
soul had grown tired, and carry her into the thick of
life, — such a life of stir, and tumult, and endeavor as
she had longed to try. What did it mean, that fate
should so have filled her cup to the brim? Why, to
her of all others, had this brilliant destiny opened?
And what ailed her, that she was not fuller of self-gratulation,
that she could take it so quietly?
They went home, and ate bride-cake, and drank
champagne; and then Elizabeth went away to take off
her misty robes. One last look her husband had of her
in those garments, as she turned at the foot of the stairs
to speak to him, her drapery, white and fleecy as
a cloud, falling about her, — a tall, slim shape, with
gleaming eyes, and hair of silken dusk, and face of
lilies not roses, save where the lips had budded red.
She looked too much like a spirit. Le Roy was glad
they went away.
He had been quite ready to fulfil his engagement
with Elizabeth, rash and ill-considered as in his secret
soul he had already begun to think it; but the whole
matter of the wedding had bored him, and he was glad
to be done with it. He had not enough of faith or
spiritual insight to have the words of the marriage service
impress him with their solemnity, or even touch
him by their beauty. It was simply a necessary evil,
with which he was thankful to be done. He was rejoiced
that Elizabeth did not cry. It was like her good
sense, he thought. But, indeed, she had not loved
any of the Fordyces enough to melt into tears over
them. The hills, as lonely as herself, were the friends
to whom her heart was knit the most closely: and as
she stood at the old window for a few silent moments,
looking out towards them, over her eyes there “began
to move something which felt like tears.” But she
turned away resolutely. She was bidding them and
her past good-by. Who knew what heights of joy,
what depths of woe, her soul would touch before she
should see those hills again?
Their long car ride was a strange bridal journey.
During those monotonous hours, Elizabeth had plenty
of leisure to think of what she had done. Now and
then she stole a look at her companion's handsome, inscrutable
face, as he bent over the newspapers with
which he had provided himself at the second station.
It did not cross her mind that he was an uncommonly
world's usages. She had never been accustomed to be
watched and tended, and she did not expect very much
in that way even from him; but she would have liked
him to talk to her a little, to satisfy her doubts of herself,
if such satisfaction were possible. She was suffering,
as she rode along, from a singular oppression, — a
dread, lest she should not be elegant enough to please
him, — should shame him by her ignorance of the ways
of that world in which he moved.
She struggled with these doubts and fears in silence,
for it was not her nature to make much ado about her
feelings. She had always borne whatever she had to
bear without words. A woman more exacting, more
accustomed to be an object of interest, would have
demanded Le Roy's attention, told him her thoughts,
constrained him to soothe or reassure her. It is possible
that this course would have suited him better,
though he did not understand himself well enough to
think so. At least, it would have given him an interest
of some kind in the affair, and an occupation. As it
was, he began to feel himself ennuied. He would have
liked to think it a respectable proceeding to take himself
off to the smoking-car, and enjoy a cigar or two in
peace. Since this would not quite do, he began to
watch Elizabeth covertly over the edge of his paper.
She was always handsomest when she talked. Now
her face was colorless and motionless, and it lacked that
perfect classical regularity which makes repose statuesque.
The excitement of capture was all over. His
submissive ever since she had worn his ring on her
finger. He felt in his heart that he might be tempted
by too much submission to become a tyrant, and he
wondered if the instinct of serfdom belonged to Elizabeth.
He was destined to find out some day.
He asked himself, in a vague discontent, to what end
he had hastened their marriage. Why could they not
have remained engaged for a few years? Then he remembered
that he had felt impelled to hurry matters
because Elizabeth had had it in her mind to go out governessing,
and plumed himself anew on the right he had
earned to her gratitude, by having saved her from this
career. At length, out of very shame, he roused himself
from this train of thought, and pointed out to his
wife some familiar object. They were nearing New
York.
Elizabeth had understood from Mrs. Henry Fordyce,
that Mr. Le Roy had a handsome establishment, but
she was hardly prepared for the quiet elegance of the
house on Madison Square to which he took her. A
housekeeper, stately in black silk, received them; and
Le Roy, bidding his wife welcome home, with more of
tenderness than he had shown her at any time during
the journey, told her that Mrs. Murray had managed
his household for years in a way that could hardly be
improved; therefore, there would be nothing for the
new queen to busy herself about but her own pleasure,
— the prime minister behind the throne would take all
trouble off her hands.
Whether or not she liked this arrangement, Elizabeth
submitted to it silently. Mrs. Murray led her upstairs
to her own room, — a spacious chamber, — from
which opened on one side an elegant sitting-room, on the
other, Mr. Le Roy's dressing-room. Strangely enough,
a passage from the Bible came into her mind at that
moment, — “All these things will I give thee if thou
wilt fall down and worship me.”
Just then, in a rush of enthusiastic emotion, she
thought it would be only too easy for her to worship
her elegant, handsome husband, from whom all her good
gifts came. She felt a new thrill of tender thankfulness
for the love which had elected her to share the half of
this man's kingdom, which brought to her eyes some
silent tears. If she had married him with any thing
short of the entire consecration of her whole being, she
had erred from pure ignorance of her own nature. But
if either this man or this woman had loved with that
unqualified surrender of self, which is so entire and so
holy, that it is little less than religion, and which is so
mighty that, felt on one side only, it has before now
made of marriage a saving ordinance, I should not have
had my story to tell.
5. CHAPTER V.
AFTER FIVE YEARS.
Five years had gone by, — years which the locusts
had eaten, as they say in Provence, — aimless, profitless
years, which yet had brought Elizabeth from eighteen
to twenty-three, and wrought, I was about to say, some
subtile changes in her character. But I correct myself.
I think all our possibilities are latent in us from our
birth. Most of us are many-sided, and circumstance,
like the turn of a wheel, brings uppermost now one side
of us, now another. Elizabeth Le Roy fancied that she
was not what Elizabeth Fordyce had been, but then
Elizabeth Fordyce had not known herself.
Of these five years she had kept no record. Elizabeth
was not the kind of woman who keeps a diary.
She could not ease her pain by spreading it over reams
of paper; or by self-pity solace herself into a sort of
luxury of woe, practically almost as desirable as happiness.
The long, slow years had eaten into her life, but
she had made no sign. Some scenes were seared upon
her soul, — some words burned into her heart so deeply
that she thought not even the river of Death could
wash them away; but neither the world nor even her
own household knew her as any thing but a prosperous,
elegant, haughty, silent woman. Only Elliott Le Roy
knew that the Queen Bess he found in Lenox had been
pang of regret of the vanished girlish sweetness?
She came downstairs, on the fifth anniversary of her
marriage, with her toilette carefully made, as usual.
Her soft, heavy black silk trailed after her soundlessly
as she walked. Dainty laces made a white mist at
throat and wrists; her jewels were pearls, quaintly set.
She had a singular charm for the eye, though she was
not, never had been, a beauty, as her husband had once
told her. It was the only outbreak of coarse sincerity
in which he had ever indulged, — the only time vulgar
truth had come, strong and passionate, to his elegant
lips. They had been married scarcely two years then;
and Elizabeth had not yet lost her faith in his love.
From the first he had left her a great deal to herself,
and she had almost always borne his absence patiently;
but this one time it entered her mind to remonstrate.
He was going away on a pleasure trip, and she begged
him either to stay at home, or to take her with him, with
an exacting earnestness to which she had never accustomed
him, and which some brutal instinct, rising to
the surface and overpowering his suave polish of manner,
impelled him to put down at once.
“It is certainly not my fault, Mrs. Le Roy, if you are
poorly entertained,” he said, coolly. “You have at
your disposal your time and my money. As my wife,
society is open to you.”
“But I am not your wife for the sake of society,” she
had persisted. “For what did you marry me, if you
did not care to have me with you, — if our lives were to
be apart?”
All that was demonic in Le Roy's nature, and that
was no little, looked for a moment out of his eyes in
contemptuous silence, then burst from his lips. “By
Heaven, what did I? What summer day's madness
was it which made me fetter myself to a woman not
rich, or distinguished, or even handsome?”
She thought, for an instant, that she should fall helpless
at his feet; then pride brought the color back to
cheek and lips.
“So you did not love me?” she asked, slowly.
“Did I? — I have forgotten.”
The words stung her with their contempt, till cheeks
and lips grew white again; not with faintness this time,
but with a white heat of passion.
“I told you once,” she said, speaking each word with
slow distinctness, “that for a man to marry a woman
without loving her, was a crime which I, for one, would
never forgive, on earth or in Heaven.”
Le Roy looked at her, and feared the spirit he had
roused. He would have given a good deal to unsay
his own words. As it was, he could only eat them.
He spoke more hurriedly than was his wont.
“Elizabeth, we are behaving like two children. If I
had not loved you, why on earth should I have chosen
you? If I loved you once, is it likely to be entirely
over in two years? Don't exasperate me into saying
things which will cause ill-blood between us. You take
the surest way to wear my love out when you are exacting,
and make me feel my chains. Remember how
free a life I had led before I knew you.”
And she, proud woman that she was, feeling herself
altogether his, too reserved and too self-respecting to
turn anywhere else for comfort, altogether helpless in
her dependence upon him, suffered him to seal a hollow
truce upon her lips; but after that day she never again
urged him to stay at home.
Since then she had been three years his wife, — just
as entirely his, subject to his pleasure, bound to hold
up his honor, as if they had loved each other with
that love which makes marriage a sacrament. She
almost hated herself when she thought of it. And now
it was the fifth anniversary of those mistaken nuptials.
The last three years had gone by her like a long and
evil dream. That one outbreak on her husband's part
had never been followed by any other. He had treated
her with all outward courtesy; but he was like the
French chevalier who killed more men in duels than
any other beau sabreur of his time, and who always
smiled as he slew. No chronicle, had she kept never
so many, could have recorded the times when she felt
the merciless pressure of the iron hand under the velvet
glove, — when his keen scorn struck home to her
heart; his merciless politeness froze her; his forgetfulness,
which seemed born of contempt, goaded her to
madness.
Sometimes she had prayed to die, with a passion
which it seemed should have opened Heaven; but not
even Death wanted her.
After a long time, suffering seemed to have deadened
her nature. Le Roy came and went, and she scarcely
were vague to her as dreams, — polite, inquiring,
sneering, it mattered not, — they made no impression.
She ceased to shrink, even on the rare occasions when
his lips touched her mouth, or he took her, his property,
into his arms with some sudden sense of that loveliness
of hers, which the slow years had brought to
something paler, purer, and more striking than of old.
Nothing made any difference to her, — nothing seemed
worth while.
She woke up this afternoon, — because it was her
wedding-day, perhaps, — and wondered what this long
and entire absence of emotion had meant. Was she
dying, or slowly going mad. Better death itself than
this hopeless apathy.
She went back upstairs, and opened a wardrobe in
an unused chamber. Her wedding-dress hung there.
She looked at the shimmering white robes and frosty
frills of lace, until they carried her back to her old
self, and the feelings and emotions of the old time.
Something in her nature seemed to break up, as the
streams do when the winter frosts are over. She felt
tears gathering in her eyes, those eyes which had been
dry so long, and she wiped them away with a thrill of
thanksgiving. Then she shut the door, and turned its
key on the ghostly, gleaming bridal fineries, and went
downstairs again, and sat in the lonely grandeur of
her drawing-room, at a window opening upon the
street.
How many weary hours she had sat there during
had watched funerals there, and weddings; beggars
and republican princes. That window had shown her
strange sights. Startling contrasts were to be seen
from it, even now; but she did not stop to marvel
at them. It seemed natural that there should be
changes in the world, — only for her there was no
change, and that was stranger than all.
She began to ask herself what it meant. For what
reason was she here, always here, — here where she
did not want to be, and where no one wanted her, —
far away from all the landmarks Fate would have
seemed in early days to have set for her, and yet held
here by the iron clutch of Fate itself? All sorts of
chances and changes happened in the world, — deaths
and births, fortunes made and lost, unexpected discoveries,
hidden things brought to light, — but for her
nothing save the same dead level, the life she hated,
with not even a breath of wind across the desert
sands.
Then suddenly as if another than herself had asked
it, the question came to her, — why did she stay here?
Why not go on to the next oasis? Somewhere over a
cool fountain the palm-trees rustled, the water of life
waited for her lips. Was she imbecile? Had she no
courage? Why had she sat still so long, and let the
years go by her, never once trying to take destiny into
her own hands, — growing old, and hopeless, and
despairing, but never struggling to help herself? Did
God make her a coward, or only a woman, — or were
suffered? Why had she married Elliott Le Roy in the
first place? But, looking back, she saw that she
could not justly blame herself for that. Her eyes had
not been opened to what love might be by any feeling
deeper than she experienced for him. She remembered
what a knight, without fear and without reproach, he
had seemed to her when she first met him, — a Saul
among his fellows. She had neither understood her
own heart then, nor had any standard by which to
measure him.
Is it not true that women are marrying as unwisely
every day? Some find out their mistake, and are still
indifferent; because to them life is in the abundance
of the things a man possesses. Will such women's
heaven, I wonder, ever be more than meat, and drink,
and raiment?
Others, in these mismated ranks, never understand
themselves. They find life a tread-mill round; but they
do not guess that it holds any deeper joy or subtler
woe than themselves have tasted.
But she did know, — this poor Elizabeth. She had
found out. She understood herself but dimly, even
yet; still she knew that there was something in her
crying out for ever with a cry that would not be
silenced, — an inner self, dying slowly, for want of
room to breathe. She wondered again why she had
stayed so long.
She had no child to look at her with its father's
pitiless blue eyes, whose possible meanings she knew so
on for that, and drawn strength from the thought that
she was suffering for another's sake, not her own. But
now she suffered for no other. Le Roy did not want
her; or, if he did, wanted her only because of his
own pride; and surely he, who had been in all things
so utterly self-seeking, deserved nothing at her hands.
Her own self-respect she would preserve. Her own
honor should be unstained; but she was not held in
the old grooves by any fiction of honor or duty toward
him. He had put those to flight long ago. Why,
then, did she sit on there idle, with the great gay
world of chances and changes outside, and grow old
and hopeless, losing all the years that should be young
and glad, doomed to a thirst which no fountain was
given her to quench?
She might have asked herself as well, if she had
been wiser, what she could possibly gain by going
away? To go away from her keeper would not free
her from her bondage. She could only drag her chain
with her. Morally and legally, the fetter would be
upon her still; and would the simple gain of not seeing
one man's face compensate her for all she must give
up, — her position of worldly ease and high repute, —
the luxuries of which long use had made necessities,
— all the good things of this world which belonged to
her as Mrs. Le Roy? But she was inconsequent by
nature, as women almost always are. Roused at last
from the torpor which had so long held her motionless
and silent as death, with no throb of feeling beyond
passionately to get away. But where should she find
any door of escape? Did God, who sent an angel to
open Peter's prison-house, keep in His Heaven any
messenger of deliverance for her?
She heard the street-door open to the master of the
house, and she sat still and waited for him. The emotions
of the afternoon had left their impress on her
face. Perhaps she had never in her life been so handsome.
Her eyes sparkled feverishly. Her cheeks
glowed. Her lips were vivid crimson. Her husband
came in, and his observant look rested upon her. He
bowed to her with an air of gallantry which seemed to
her so hollow, that her very soul rose in rebellion
against it. He said, as he bent before her, — “I
congratulate myself, Mrs. Le Roy, on having your
face in my drawing-room. It has blossomed anew
to-day.”
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked, coldly.
“Let me see, — fifth, sixth, seventh of November, is
it not?”
“It is the fifth anniversary of our marriage.”
“And in honor of that your roses have bloomed?
I congratulate myself that you have retained through
five years of matrimony so much sentiment for me.”
“Sentiment for you!”
She got up and stood before him, a slight shape,
with her soft lengths of black silk falling around her;
her gleaming eyes, her cheeks, where burned the roses
he had praised. Her voice was low, but awfully distinct.
into a well.
“I will tell you just how much sentiment I have for
you, Elliott Le Roy. I hate you. You took me, a
warm-hearted, honest girl, ready to love you. But
you did not want my love. You have chilled me, till
now my heart is ice, too. I only want one thing in
this world, and that is to get away from you.”
“Take care, Elizabeth.”
She looked straight into his eyes, and saw a red
gleam kindle them. His face was livid. His lips were
set. But she only laughed a bitter laugh.
“No, I will not take care. I have taken care long
enough; and lived in mortal fear of your cold, sneering
words, and your pitiless eyes. I don't want to stay
with you. Why should I stay?”
Le Roy smiled, — a smile which was not good to
see.
“I will tell you why, but take a seat first, if you
please. We are not upon the stage, and we can talk
more at our ease in a less dramatic position.”
She obeyed the inclination of his hand, and sat down.
He went on, quietly, — “I will tell you why you should
stay; because it is my pleasure. I do not choose to
have my domestic matters in the mouth of every man
about town. It is my will that you remain here, and I
think you will not be mad enough to go away. If you
left me without other justification than you could bring,
do you think there is any capacity in which scrupulous
people would receive you into their houses? There
yourself. You could take your choice between starving
and going back to Lenox. Perhaps your uncle
would welcome you cheerfully, if he found you had
forsaken your own home. Of that you can judge; you
know him, probably, better than I do. I should
scarcely fancy, however, that to go back among your
old friends, under such altered circumstances, would
quite suit you. About that you can consider, however.
In the mean time, if you please, we will go to dinner.
It has been waiting ten minutes already, and you had
best understand fully that our affairs shall not be talked
about in our kitchen.”
He offered her his arm, and she took it, girding
fiercely at herself. Why had she not courage to refuse
to keep up this sham? Why was she still meekly
obeying the man she hated?
Le Roy talked in his lightest and most sparkling vein
while dinner was served. Jones — oh, the sagacity of
our domestic critics — remarked downstairs, between
the courses, that he guessed something had gone wrong
with the master to-day, he was so extra smiling and
smooth.
Elizabeth constrained herself to make answers when
they were necessary; but she went on, meanwhile, with
her own thoughts. Clearly, her husband would never
help her to break from her bonds, and what could she
do of herself? She had said once, that when she was
old or tired of life she should want to go to Lenox and
die there. But she was not ready to go there now, and
full of life, in spite of her despair; and she thought
death might be too long in coming.
After all, was she not utterly helpless? She would
have shown herself wiser to have gone on in silence, in
the old, passive way. Now, of course, Le Roy would
never forget or forgive what she had told him. Still,
what matter? What could he do to make her life any
more hopeless or barren than it had been so long? That
night, when she had said her prayers, — the old, simple,
familiar prayers of her childhood, — she added to them
another, — “O God, thou who didst send the angel
to Peter, open for me a door, — I pray thee, for thy
mercy's sake, open for me also a door!”
She forgot, entirely, to say, “Thy will, not mine, be
done.” She was like some passionate child crying for
the moon. If the moon should fall at his entreaty, the
child's destruction would be sure and swift; but still
the Father holds the heavens in their places, and rules
the lives of men.
6. CHAPTER VI.
AN OPENING DOOR.
Three weeks went by without a single allusion having
been made to the passionate words Elizabeth had
spoken. Whether her husband believed them, understood
a momentary outbreak, born of “just the least little
touch of spleen,” she could not guess. He had ever since
treated her with his customary smooth politeness. It
had been seldom always that he gave her any thing
positive to complain of, but she had thought sometimes
that Torquemada himself never invented tortures keener
or subtler than hers.
Le Roy had once questioned within himself whether
the instinct of serfdom belonged to Elizabeth. If this
instinct provides that the serf shall love his chains,
assuredly she had none of it; for though she wore hers
in silence, every day they galled her more and more, and
her spirit grew more and more bitter and impatient.
“Was there really a God in Heaven?” she asked
herself sometimes, “who cared for His creatures? Had
He not rather framed some pitiless laws under which
He had set His universe in motion, and then, sitting
serene and far-off in His Heaven, undisturbed by any
groans or sighs, left them to crush every offender against
them to powder?” If she had only had a little faith;
but for her, in those days, neither the sun shone by
day, or the stars by night. Her heavens were as dark
as her earth.
One forenoon Le Roy came in, and found her sitting
idle and listless, as usual.
“I am off to-day,” he said, “with a party of gentlemen
for Havana.”
“And I?” she asked, lifting her eyes to his face.
“You will of course remain in your own house. You
made for your comfort. You need not be troubled
with any cares concerning money. Mrs. Murray is
competent for all indoor details. Jones will supply any
outside wants. You will find your credit excellent at
all the places where you are accustomed to trade; and
you need have no anxiety about any thing.”
Elizabeth understood him fully. She saw that she
was not to be trusted with money, lest she might use it
to baffle her keeper's will. She spoke the thought
which came uppermost.
“You might as well send me to a private mad-house
at once.”
He smiled, his cool, cynical smile.
“Oh, no, I do not think that will be necessary. Such
things have been done, when women have shown themselves
incapable of understanding their own interests.
In such a case a husband, of course, would not hesitate;
but you, I think, will be wiser. You have speculated
a good deal about social questions. You used,
I remember, to have quite fine-spun theories of life.”
Poor theories, she thought, — where had they brought
her?
She sat silent, and watched her husband as he moved
round the room, selecting a few things he wished to
take, and restoring others to their places. She began
to feel a sort of curiosity about their parting, thinking
of herself in a vague, questioning way, as if she were
a third person. Would that man kiss this waiting,
watchful woman when he bade her good-by, she wondered.
shrank from it. She felt a wholly impersonal curiosity,
such as I suppose every one of us may have felt about
ourselves, in moments when emotion has grown torpid
and observation is wide-awake. It was not his habit
to make affectionate farewells; but then he had never
gone on a sea voyage before; and she believed there
was some tradition about connubial kisses before long
partings. But, no; when he was quite ready he only
said, with that irritating, condescending politeness,
which always nearly maddened her, — “Good-by, Mrs.
Le Roy. You must manage to amuse yourself. I hope
you will not be dull during my absence.”
And then he was gone.
Elizabeth sat still where he left her. Her face was
like marble, but her soul was in arms. He could wander
where he liked, — he need not even go through the
idle ceremony of consulting her. His own pleasure was
his only law. For her there was no freedom of choice,
no change of place such as she would welcome, even
though it were only change of pain. She, this rich
man's wife, had not a paltry hundred dollars at her
command. Here she was, shut in by these brick walls,
held fast by Fate; and outside, still outside, was the
world, as much beyond her reach, with its great and
strange delights of chance and change, its bewildering
excitements for heart and brain, as it had been when
she lived among the lonely, lovely Lenox hills.
Just here I want to protest against being supposed
to endorse the course of my poor Elizabeth. I tell you
because I show her to you as she was, you have no
right to conclude that I show her to you as I think she
ought to have been. Unquestionably she would have
been nobler had she striven to conquer her fate, instead
of sitting and longing vainly for means to flee from it.
Many, many faults she had. She was rash, undisciplined,
wanting in faith as in patience; and yet, just
such as she was, I loved her very deeply, and would
rather pity than blame.
For a week after her husband went away, she sat
alone, and brooded in a kind of passionate despair over
the circumstances which environed her, at feud alike
with Fate and with Providence. Then there came to
her a letter with the Lenox post-mark. This was a
rare event, for during her married life she had seldom
heard from Lenox. She had not cared so much for any
of the Fordyces, that it had cost her any special pain
to let them drift out of her life. If she had been very
happy, she might possibly, after the manner of women,
have liked to summon them as witnesses of her felicity.
As it was, she had acquiesced willingly enough in her
husband's opinion, that “it would just be a bore to
have them there; country relations always wanted
showing round, and it was the most tedious thing in
life;” and therefore none of her cousins had ever visited
her. She had always sent them gifts at Christmas
time; and upon the announcement of Kate's marriage
to a well-to-do young Berkshireman, a handsome silver
set had gone to her, in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Le
of either of the “three Graces.”
Elizabeth broke the seal, and first of all there fluttered
into her lap a piece of newspaper. She took it
up, and read the announcement of her uncle's death;
and after it a long obituary, setting forth his excellencies
as husband, father, man of business, member of
society at large.
“Poor old uncle,” Elizabeth said, with a sad smile,
“he has departed this life with all the honors.”
Then she took up her letter again. It was in two
sheets. The first, which enclosed the other, was from
a lawyer, whose name she recognized, but who was not
her uncle's customary legal adviser. She remembered
him as a man whose integrity stood in very high repute
in Lenox.
His letter informed her that three weeks ago the late
Mr. Fordyce had called upon him, and entrusted to his
care eight thousand dollars, with the understanding that
as soon as convenient, after his decease, it should be forwarded
to herself in the form of a draft on some good
New York bank. At that time Mr. Fordyce had shown
no signs of illness, but, notwithstanding his apparently
good health, had seemed to be impressed with a conviction
that he had not long to live; and, for some
domestic reasons, into the nature of which he did not
enter, had wished to have this money conveyed to Mrs.
Le Roy in such a manner that it need not come to the
knowledge of even his own family. Doubtless the enclosed
letter from her uncle, of the contents of which he
matter clear to her. In a day or two after this interview,
Mr. Fordyce had been seized with the sudden
illness which terminated his life; and as soon as practicable
afterwards, arrangements had been made for carrying
out his instructions with regard to the money.
Mrs. Le Roy would find the draft enclosed. The late
Mr. Fordyce had provided for all the details; and Mr.
Mills had only to request of Mrs. Le Roy an acknowledgment
of the safe receipt of his letter and its enclosures.
With curious emotion Elizabeth took up the draft
and looked at it, — a draft in due form for eight thousand
dollars, payable to her order. Was there, after all,
a God in Heaven, whose ears were not deaf to the cry
of a weak woman's woe, — who heard prayers and answered
them? Her uncle must have gone to Lawyer
Mills about this matter just after those wild entreaties
of hers, that the God of Peter would open to her also
a door. And now her door was opening; for she never
doubted for one single instant what use she should
make of this money.
She broke open the dead man's letter next in order,
and this was what it said: —
“My Niece Elizabeth, — I believe myself to be
about to die. I cannot tell why this belief has taken
hold of me, but I am sure that I am not long for this
world. And, before I go out of it, I have an act of
restitution to perform. When your father, my dead
your due, you would have had six thousand dollars.
But the business was embarrassed at the time, and I
thought that to put so much money out of my hands
just then would ruin me. I took the responsibility,
therefore, of deciding not to do it. I managed, by
means that were not strictly legitimate, to keep the
whole in my own possession. I did not mean ill by
you, either. Your memory will bear me witness that I
dealt by you in every way as by my own children; nor
do I think the interest of your six thousand dollars, in
whatever way invested, could possibly have taken care
of you so well as I did. Still, to have it to use in my
business at that critical time, was worth much more
than the cost of your maintenance to me. So, as I look
at matters, you owe me no thanks for your upbringing,
and I owe you no farther compensation for the use of
your money during those years which you passed in
my house. For the five years since then, I owe you
interest; and I have added to your six thousand dollars
two thousand more, to reimburse you for your loss during
that time.
“If my life should be prolonged for many weeks, I
shall make arrangements for quietly putting you in possession
of this sum; but I do not think it will be prolonged.
I am acting upon a profound conviction that
my days in this world are almost numbered. I had
rather that this matter should not come to your knowledge
till after I am gone. As I have not defrauded
you of a single dollar, but on the other hand have, as I
money than you could have obtained for it in any other
way, I think I have a right to request you to keep the
whole thing a secret. The most careful investigation of
my affairs will not reveal the fact of any subtraction from
my property. This fund is one which, ever since your
marriage, I have been saving, gradually and secretly,
for this very purpose. There is no need to toss my
name to the geese of Berkshire; or even to make
known to my wife and children that I had done something
which, it may be, their notions of right would lead
them to condemn. I acted according to my own lights;
and I repeat, Elizabeth, I have not wronged you by so
much as a dollar. If your husband must know this
matter, at least let it go no farther. When you read
these lines, I shall be standing, it may be, at your father's
side; and for the reason that I was his brother, if
for no other, I believe that you will deal gently with
my memory.
Elizabeth's seldom falling tears wet the last words of
this letter.
“Poor old Uncle Isaac,” she said aloud; “you builded
better than you knew. You have opened my door, and
it is little to ask that not a soul on earth shall ever
know your secret.”
7. CHAPTER VII.
OUT OF THE CAGE.
Elizabeth had no conflict of ideas at this time,
For her this eight thousand dollars had but one use, —
flight from her fate; one meaning, — freedom. She
felt as if Heaven itself had dropped this unexpected
bounty into her lap. This was what she had been
praying for. At last, in this great world of chances
and changes, something had happened even to her.
Now she could break her chains, elude her keeper.
The eleventh day of December, she stood on the
deck of a steamer, outward bound for Havre. All her
arrangements had been completed with a tact and
secrecy and worldly wisdom which surprised herself.
Not even Mrs. Murray's vigilance or Jones's curiosity
had suspected her. Her outfit, the deep mourning of
a widow, had been made at a University Place dress-maker's,
whom she had never patronized before. She
took off her diamond ring, and laid it in her jewel-casket.
She locked drawers and wardrobes, and put
the keys in an envelope, which she sealed and directed
to her husband, leaving it in his desk. She left with
it no word of farewell. She was utterly indifferent as
to what he thought. She believed that he had no
heart to be wounded. She credited him with no unselfish
anxiety for her safety. As for his pride, he
of him when once that great, glittering diamond eye
was off her finger. She would take nothing of his,
nothing except the plain gold wedding-ring, which
was to corroborate her widow's weeds. Even the
simple walking-dress which she wore to University
Place, when she went to put on her mourning, was
purchased with her own money. She left the house on
foot, as if to take an ordinary walk; and that night
dinner waited for her in vain at Madison Square, and
she ate hers between blue water and blue sky.
Her name was registered in the list of passengers as
Mrs. E. Nugent. As Nugent was both the name of her
mother and her own middle name, she felt that she had
a certain right to this designation, and was not exactly
sailing under false colors.
The passage occupied thirteen days, and during that
time she had ample leisure to arrange her plans for
the future. The interest of her small fortune would
be but a meagre support, she knew, even in Paris,
where she had heard that the expenses of living were
much less than in New York. Still, if a pittance, it
was at least something fixed and certain, and she could
live on it, if compelled by necessity. In the eager joy
with which in those days she contemplated her freedom,
she thought no life apart from her husband,
whatever its privations, could be so comfortless or
so barren that she would not infinitely prefer it to the
fate she had left behind her. Still she believed herself
to have resources. She had some knowledge of French,
from such teachers as a country place affords. Her
accent was bad, she knew; her grammar at fault; her
ignorance conspicuous in every sentence she tried to
frame. But these things would mend daily. Meantime,
her French could not be much worse than the English
of most of the language-masters whom she had been in
the habit of seeing; and she thought her inaccuracies
and inelegancies need not prevent her from seeking
and probably finding employment as an English teacher
in Paris. She had begun to acquire confidence in her
own executive ability, which had stood her in such
good stead in the last few days.
She withdrew herself during the voyage, almost
entirely, from the rest of the passengers, as her deep
mourning gave her an excellent excuse for doing; but
more than one had noticed with an interest kinder
than mere curiosity the young, delicate-looking woman,
with her sad, sweet face, who knew no one, and whom
on one knew.
“We shall see Havre to-morrow,” the captain said,
going up to her, as she sat on deck looking over the
railing into the lapsing waters, alone as usual.
Captain Ellis was a man in his fifties, — such a man
as the sea makes of material good in the first place, —
cool-brained, quick-witted, clear-headed, large of heart,
strong of muscle; above all, with no shams about
him; entirely true, and entirely in earnest.
From the commencement of the voyage, Elizabeth's
face had interested him, and her loneliness appealed to
his own, as far as years went; and this man, who was
only the father of sons, felt for her a curious tenderness,
though they had scarcely exchanged a dozen sentences.
He could not bear to let her slip away from him like
the waves in the wake of his vessel, and leave no
mark. At least he must know whether she was going
to a safe harbor.
I have spoken before of the singular charm of Elizabeth's
voice. Captain Ellis felt it in the few words
which answered him. Nothing in her manner, however,
invited him to prolong the conversation; still,
secure of his own good intentions, he determined to
seem curious and officious in her eyes, rather than
miss any possible chance of serving her. He stood
beside her silently for a few moments, then he asked,
apropos of nothing, as it appeared, — “Did you ever
fancy that gray hairs might be an advantage, Mrs.
Nugent?”
She gave, at the sound of the name by which she
had been so seldom called, a slight start which did not
escape his notice; but her voice was very quiet, as she
said, — “I suppose every one longs for them, or for
what they signify, who is tired of life. Any sign that
one is nearing the end must be welcome.”
“But I am not tired of life, Mrs. Nugent, or in any
present hurry to get to any better place than Havre.
I have found life a good thing. My days have been
good days, and I am in no haste to end them. I like
the salt, free wind, the wide sea, the watching sky;
please God, to die bravely when I must. Still I find
an advantage in gray hairs, notwithstanding. But for
them, and the fact that I am quite old enough to
be your father, I should not venture to ask you, as
I am going to, whether I can be of any assistance to
you after you leave the ship. I suppose you will go on
to Paris; and if you have no friends to meet you at
Havre, perhaps there will be some way in which I can
serve you.”
Elizabeth looked up to him, a sudden rush of tears
swimming in her dark eyes, her old, eager impulsiveness
glowing on her changeful face.
“No one will meet me anywhere. I am all alone in
the world, — running away from my destiny; but it
seems to me God must have brought me so far, and
perhaps He will help me on.”
For a few moments Captain Ellis did not speak.
Then he said very gravely and very tenderly, — “Tell
me as much or as little as you like. But let me help
you if I can. I have a wife at home, who is as good a
woman as ever God made; and I had one daughter,
who died before she had spoken a word except my
name. If she had lived, she might have been about
your age, now. I think I would not have let her take
her life in her hand, as you have done; but I would
have blessed any man who showed her kindness. For
her sake, and her mother's sake, I would like to be
kind to you.”
“My father and my mother are in Heaven,” Elizabeth
very much. I cannot tell you my story; but I have
done nothing which would have been unworthy of
your daughter had she grown up to womanhood.
If you will believe me, and help me, without knowing
any more, I will indeed be thankful, for I am friendless.
No soul in France has ever heard of me; but I think
I shall do very well there, if I can manage the first
steps. I have money enough to keep myself from
absolute want, and my plan is to add to my income by
teaching English.”
Captain Ellis considered for a few moments before he
said, — “I was trying to think whether I could get
away from the ship for twenty-four hours, and I do not
see how it can be done. But I will put you in the cars
for Paris, and give you a letter to the American consul
there. He happens to be an old friend of mine; but,
even if he were not, you, as his countrywoman, would
have a claim upon his care. I shall have to trust the
business of getting you properly located to him.”
Elizabeth had had the consulate in her mind before
as the ark of refuge for an American citizen; but the
captain's letter would make matters much easier for
her, and she thanked him warmly. She had scarcely
realized how lonely she was until she was taught it by
the contrasting comfort she felt in the friendly interest
of this stranger.
As she sat in the cars, in the early morning of the
next day but one, whirling on toward Paris, she began,
for the first time since she started on her long journey,
land. She had Captain Ellis's letter in her pocket, and
he had given minute directions for her guidance; and
yet it came over her, with a sense of awful desolation,
that she was going into the midst of the world's Babel,
the great, tumultuous city of which she had heard so
much, all alone. In that seething, surging sea of
human life, who was there to care if her little bark
went down?
She pressed her face close against the car-window,
and looked out over the strange, unknown land, up to the
constant, always known sky, — God's Heaven, arching
over all. She had cried out to Him before, in the bitterness
of her despair, half doubtful whether He would
hear or heed her; but she had never learned to draw
nigh to Him as to a loving Father. It was strange that
just at this hour, with the unaccustomed scenes of this
new country before her, the murmurs of the almost unknown
tongue buzzing in her ears, the faces whose
aspect was so unfamiliar about her, she first began to
have a near and sweet sense of the Friend who might
be closer than all, — so that out of the very unrest of
time and place, her soul drew nigh to the rest which is
everlasting. It is not for any seer or psychologist of us
all to explain the mental or spiritual experiences of
another soul. Such analysis is beyond our weak vision;
but the truth remains, by whatever means wrought,
that for the first time in Elizabeth's life she felt herself
ready to say, not as an idle form of words, but out of
the depths of her heart, — “Thy will be done.”
What that will was she did not know; or guess how
widely she might have strayed from the path it had
marked out for her. She was yet to learn her lesson
of life through bitter sorrows; but she felt now that,
however long or lonely the way she trod, she should
never again experience the awful solitariness of a soul
without God in the world.
She grew interested at last in the scenes through
which she was passing, — the low, yet pleasant fields,
where old women with blue umbrellas watched their
cows, or shepherds with their dogs guarded the flocks;
the odd little stone huts, scarcely six feet high, where
the Norman peasants burrowed, with houses of substantial
elegance interspersed now and then; forests, with
their trees set out in rows; quaint costumes; picturesque
churches; pretty railway stations, — every thing
had for her the charm of novelty, the glamour which
invests the unknown.
As she neared Paris, her heart began to beat suffocatingly;
but she found the provident care of Captain
Ellis had extended farther than she knew. A civil
man, wearing the badge of a guard, came forward, and
saved her all trouble with her luggage; and almost before
she knew it she was in a fiacre, driving toward the
consulate, in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.
The consul received her with a courtesy, which became
friendliness as soon as he had read Captain Ellis's
letter.
“I think I know the very thing that will suit you,”
he said, “if it is not already taken up. A friend of
quiet rooms, in a quiet old house on the Rue Jacob.
He boarded with a French family, a man and his wife,
who occupy the third floor, and who let him, at a very
reasonable rate, a bedroom and a little sitting-room.
If you could get it, it would be just the place to cast
anchor in at first, — when you know Paris better, you
can make a change if you choose?”
“I shall be thankful enough to cast anchor in any
safe harbor, and stay there,” Elizabeth said, gratefully.
“Then I will send a clerk with you at once. If unfortunately
the rooms are engaged, and you will drive
back here, we will see what else can be done. In addition
to my interest in serving one of my countrywomen,
any friend of Captain Ellis has a peculiar claim upon
me.”
Fortunately the rooms au troisiéme in the house in the
Rue Jacob were not engaged, — most fortunately, Elizabeth
said to herself, for she fell in love with the quaint
old house at once; and her delight was intensified when
she looked out of the windows of the little third-story
back sitting-room, which was to be her own. In the
rear of the house was a delicious old garden, shutting
in a quarter of an acre of ground, in the very heart of
the city. Over the high walls ivy ran luxuriantly, — a
summer-house was in the centre, and flower-beds and
shrubbery promised pleasantly for the spring.
She left the clerk, a voluble Frenchman, to make her
bargain for her, and the matter was settled in five minutes.
Her luggage was brought upstairs, and Madame
brilliant cleanliness, their smoothly waxed floors, and
inefficient little fires far within the deep jambs, sending
frightened jets of flame up the chimneys. Her delight
in it all was as fresh as a child's. She liked the odd
furniture, — the bits of rug in front of bed, and easy-chair,
and sofa, the inevitable clock and pair of candlesticks
on the chimney-piece, the heavy chintz curtains
about her little bed.
It was her first unalloyed taste of pleasant novelty,
poor girl, and she had left no one whom she loved behind,
— no one to mourn after, no one to be sorry for
her. Her eyes grew bright as she looked around her,
and a fresh glow came to her cheeks. At last she was
out in the world for which she had longed. And she
guessed so little what lay before her, — as little as we
all divine of our to-morrows, God help us.
8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE DOCTOR DOWNSTAIRS.
“And madame has no friends in Paris?”
“Not one, good Madame Ponsard, unless you will let
me call you by that name.”
The flexible, tender, pathetic voice found its way to
Madame Ponsard's heart, and a tear in her eye answered
for granted.”
“I think I may, for you have been very kind to me.”
Elizabeth had just come home from giving an English
lesson. She had five pupils already, though she had
been in Paris scarcely a month. Madame Ponsard had
procured them for her; and though they were bourgeois,
they paid very well, and she considered herself
in quite comfortable circumstances.
She felt a sense of freedom, of expansion, which exhilarated
her like wine. She changed her habits with
her mood. She was no longer studious. The books
which had been at once the solace and the occupation
of her past life, were left with that past behind her.
She spent her leisure hours in wandering round the old
Faubourg St. Germain, in the midst of which was the
Rue Jacob; and taking in all the strange sights and
sounds which everywhere met eye and ear.
Sometimes she went to Notre Dame, and idled an
hour away pleasantly looking at the wonderful stone
carvings on the exterior of the church, wondering
whether the carver, fashioning here a saint, and hard
by a devil leading some doomed band to endless woe,
here a bird and there an evil beast, had builded with
some pious purpose of making every thing that hath
breath praise the Lord; or whether he had laughed a
wicked laugh as he cut the incongruous shapes.
She developed, too, quite a love for harmless gossip.
She liked to hear Madame Ponsard's voluble chatter
about Monsieur Grey, the artist, who used to occupy
American doctor, whose apartment was just underneath
them, and who used to come upstairs so often to see
the artist, his compatriot, — such a clever man, madame
said. Why, he had given her a tisane once for
herself, and her throat had never been sore since.
It is possible that Elizabeth wanted to hear some of
these often-told stories over again on this particular afternoon,
late in January, when she took her work and went
into madame's little sitting-room. But somehow the
talk drifted first to her own affairs. There was a space
of silence after Madame Ponsard had asked whether
Elizabeth had any friends in Paris, — a space of silence
which the French woman broke rather hesitatingly.
“And, — I beg pardon, but madame's face is so
young, and her mourning so fresh, — I suppose Monsieur
Nugent cannot have been long dead?”
“I lost my husband the week before I started for
Paris,” Elizabeth replied, in a tone which made her voluble
companion feel that no more questions were to be
asked. She bent over her sewing again, while Elizabeth
looked idly down the street; for madame's sitting-room
was on the front. At last she said, with a little
color in her cheeks, — “I met a new face this afternoon
as I came up the stairs.”
“What sort of face?” madame inquired, with eager
interest.
“A very good face, I should think. A man with
kind-looking gray eyes, brown hair, and strong, resolute
features, — not handsome, and not young.”
Madame laughed, and patted softly together her
pudgy little hands. “Good! good! That is the doctor
downstairs. I know him from what you say. But
he is not old, — not forty yet. Madame Nugent is so
young, that what seems youth to me is like old age to
her. Oh, but Dr. Erskine is not ill-looking, either.”
“No,” Elizabeth answered, musingly. “I said he
was not handsome; but I think he is better than that.
It is a face one can trust. How happens it I have
never seen him before?”
“Some of the time he was away. For the rest, his
hours for going out and coming in have been different
from yours. But I am glad you like his looks. He is
your countryman, and if you should be ill, that would
be one grand comfort.”
“For what is he here?”
“To study in the hospitals. Monsieur Grey said he
was a great doctor in his own country; but he wanted
to see some practice here; you know our surgeons are
the most skilful in the world. It was last fall he came,
and he said he might stay a year.”
Elizabeth was ready to laugh at herself for the absurd
interest and curiosity she experienced about this stranger,
whom she had just met on the stairs; but then, in
apology for her weakness, she thought how few human
interests she had. And, after all, the face was that of
a countryman. She began to think that there might be
more in that tie than she had quite realized.
After this day she met Dr. Erskine frequently. Of
course it is not to be supposed that he changed his
forty could not be suspected of watching from his window
for the passing along the street of a slight, swift
shape in black, and then of snatching hat and gloves,
just for the sake of meeting on the stairs a white,
young face, framed in by a widow's cap, and making to
this, his neighbor, a silent bow. But somehow these
interviews happened so often that this doctor, with
whom she had never exchanged a word, but yet who
was her countryman, grew to seem more closely her
friend than any one else she had met in Paris. Some
sure instinct told her that he was a man to be trusted
all in all. How happy his wife must be, if he had one,
— or his mother and sisters, — for she could not quite
fancy him a man to have left a wife behind him.
Before February was over, an intuition told her that
the American doctor, with his good, reliable face, might
be destined to be more of a blessing to her than she
had as yet fancied.
She had been married so long, with never a child to
lay its bright head on her bosom, that she had ceased
to think of this among the possibilities. And now,
gradually, but surely, the knowledge came to her that
before midsummer her baby, hers, would be numbered
among the world's little children. At first she trembled
with emotion, — half bliss, half a fear too exquisite
for pain. Then another thought smote her like a blow.
She had said in her passionate pride, that she would
bring away nothing belonging to Elliott Le Roy. And
now this child who was to come would be as much his
she taken from him something which might have
changed his life, wrought out his salvation, — something,
at any rate, which it was his right to have?
Must she go back? Was it her duty?
Then, with the ready sophistry which comes so
easily to us all in the cause of our dearest wishes, she
persuaded herself that he would have given the child
no welcome, — that, if he knew all, he would very
likely be thankful to her for taking it out of his way,
— that, at any rate, it was hers, as it never could
be his, and she was ready to pay the price for its
possession. Now, indeed, she would have something to
love, — something to be her very own, and fill heart
and arms both full. Surely God knew just how much
loneliness and solitude of soul she could bear, and had
tempered His winds to her uses.
No more wanderings now round the old Faubourg,
or in the galleries looking at carven stone or painted
virgins. She had told her secret to Madame Ponsard;
and the two women had bought, with real feminine
delight, a store of lace and cambric and fine linen.
Elizabeth kept on with her English lessons; for she
was more ambitious than ever to make money, and
add to her provision for the future. But all the time
she was at home she was sewing away at the dainty
little garments mothers have fashioned between tears
and smiles since ever the world began.
She thought she was at last happy; but it would
have seemed to a looker on the saddest thing in life to
robes of hers; so young, so solitary, and yet so full of
womanly hope and courage.
One April day, Madame Ponsard paid a secret visit
to Dr. Erskine, and told him privately all which she
herself knew of her boarder's history.
“Of course,” she said, “you will be the one to attend
her when her trial comes; and I thought it might be
better if you should see her now and then beforehand,
and get to seem not quite a stranger to her. I will
open the way by being sick to-night or to-morrow, —
and, indeed, I am troubled by a fearful indigestion.”
Madame drew out a long sigh, and Dr. Erskine
smiled as he looked at her black, bead-like eyes, and
her fat, rosy, unromantically healthy face.
“I will come the moment you send for me,” he said.
“So, Madame Nugent started for Paris the week after
she lost her husband?”
“Yes. She told me that much, one day. It was in
answer to some question of mine; and there was
something in her manner that made me think it would
be just as well not to ask her any thing more, — though,
indeed, as monsieur knows, I am the least curious of
women.”
Dr. Erskine looked smilingly after the good-natured
little gossip as she trotted away. Then he turned
back into his room and shut the door.
“At last!” he said to himself; and then he laughed,
as a third person might, at grave, thirty-eight-years-old
Dr. John Erskine being as eager as a boy about a new
acquaintance.
“No wonder. The truth is, I have so few things here
to think of,” he said, apologizing to himself as Elizabeth
had done before. Then he sat down at his window
and looked out. It was about time for his neighbor to
return from giving her English lessons.
That evening the bonne from the floor above knocked
at his door. Madame Ponsard was very ill, — had sent
for him, — would he come quickly?
He put a little case of bottles in his pocket, and,
assuming an expression of grave interest, hurried upstairs.
Madame Ponsard was lying on a horse-hair
sofa, and Madame Nugent was bending over her anxiously,
with fan and sal volatile. A humorous twinkle
in Madame Ponsard's eye, as she began the woful tale
of her sufferings, nearly upset Dr. Erskine's composure;
but he maintained his gravity with a struggle,
and at once mixed and administered a portion of medicine,
— not very hard to take, as madame's satisfied
expression sufficiently indicated, — and then sat down
to await its effects.
They were almost immediate. In fifteen minutes
madame sat up, declaring that she felt as well as ever,
and that Dr. Erskine was a man the most remarkable
she had ever seen. Then she introduced him in due
form to Madame Nugent; and he lingered a half hour
longer to express his delight at meeting a countrywoman,
and to pave the way for future visits.
After that he spent an hour, as often as once a week,
in Madame Ponsard's sitting-room, and Elizabeth was
usually present. She tasted a pleasure in these interviews,
first time in her life she was brought into close
relations with a man whose intellect satisfied her, at
the same time that she could entirely respect his moral
qualities. He had two distinguishing traits, as was
before very long made clear to her, — a will sovereign
over himself as over others, and a tenderness which
took into its shelter every living thing which was more
helpless or more desolate than he, and which, she
thought, must hold and cherish whatever was his very
own with a devotion exceeding the love of woman.
Perhaps you are reading these lines without half
comprehending how noble and how dangerous a man
Dr. John Erskine was. Count over the men whom you
know, and tell me how many you find who have
inflexible wills, without being grasping, selfish, firm
for themselves rather than for others, — or how many
who are delicately sensitive and tender, and yet have
strength to stand up grandly, and are not blown about
by every wind. When you have counted this beadroll
of saints, you will know better whether I have
given John Erskine rare praise when I have said that
his will was as firm as his heart was tender. I called
him not only noble, but dangerous; for he was such a
man, it seems to me, as a woman like Elizabeth, who
had been wounded so cruelly by the absence of the
very qualities which he so largely possessed could
hardly know intimately with safety to her own peace
of mind. Just now, however, it appeared that she
wore proof of mail, her whole heart was so full of
whom the summer was to lay in her arms. It is possible
that, after all, the chief danger may have been for
Dr. Erskine.
9. CHAPTER IX.
WHILE THE MUSIC PLAYED.
It was the very last of June, when, for hours and
days, death stood waiting in Elizabeth's little room;
and Dr. Erskine fought with him, and at length won
the victory. But for his wonderful skill, and still more
wonderful care, as Elizabeth knew afterwards, neither
she nor her child would ever have lived through those
dark hours. For days both their lives seemed to hang
on a very frail thread; but the poor young mother was
delirious all the time, slipping from one wild dream into
another; and when at length she woke to consciousness,
the danger was past, and her week-old baby lay
on the bed beside her.
She looked at the exquisite child as if that, too, were
a dream. Then she put out her hand and touched the
pink, soft flesh, and drew it back again, satisfied. The
little morsel had rings of dusky, silken hair like her
own, and faint, shadowy eyelashes resting on its cheeks.
How eagerly she watched it, only mothers know. She
and it were all alone. She scarcely dared to breathe,
lest she should break the slumber which wrapped it like
— not with a cry, but with a soft rustle, a stretching
out of the little arms here and there, a low murmur,
then wide opening eyes. Elizabeth looked into those
eyes eagerly. They were the darkest of gray.
“Thank God,” she said, under her breath. “The child
is stamped mine, not his. It will not be like him in a
single feature.”
It uttered, just then, a little, twittering cry, in which
she fancied she heard the music of the spheres. The
faint sound brought in Madame Ponsard. Her eyes
filled with tears when she saw Elizabeth's face of quiet
content, and realized that the crisis was past, and the
reign of hope had begun. But she only said with true
French tact, going up to the bedside, — “So madame
concluded to wake up and look at her little daughter?
I hope madame is satisfied with the prettiest baby in
Paris?”
“My little daughter, — my little daughter.” Elizabeth
said the words over to herself. A girl with her
eyes, her nature. God save her from her fate! She
would need to have a great many prayers said for her,
this little one.
Two weeks more went by before Elizabeth could sit
up, — and two weeks after that before she could go out
into the beautiful summer, and gather the flowers of
which the wide, rambling, old-fashioned garden, far
down underneath her windows, was full. During all
this time Dr. Erskine came daily, and brought in the
sunshine with him, — sunshine blossoming in roses and
was happy, for the first time in her life, with an untold,
indescribable happiness. She thought it was all because
of the baby fingers with their waxen touches, the tender
lips which drained her sorrow dry.
The baby, — whom she had named Marian Nugent,
after her mother, but whom every one called “mignonne,”
or “chérie,” or “little angel,” — was indeed
queen of the old house in the Rue Jacob. Madame
Ponsard adored the little one. Childless through all
her life herself, the instinct of motherhood, so powerful
with women, came now to the surface, and overflowed
in devotion to this child, born under her roof, and half
her own, therefore, as she reasoned. Monsieur Ponsard
drank less absinthe, and gave up a good many games
of baccarat, to look wonderingly at this new importation
from Heaven, this last and most touching of miracles.
The gay widow on the first floor, even, came up
to lay her offerings on the universal shrine. And as for
the doctor, it became a customary thing not only for
him to spend half his leisure time indoors, wherever the
white-robed wonder might be found, but to take it
down with him, and out into the garden, in his great,
strong, tender arms.
Elizabeth's eyes and heart kindled over the new sight
of a man so masterful and yet so gentle. When she
got well enough, she used to follow down to the old
garden, and sit there, and look after him and her baby,
as they went to and fro among the flowers. Sometimes
the little one would go to sleep, and then Dr. Erskine
stay and watch them both, and talk of “life, death, and
the vast forever;” or Elizabeth would tell him stories
of her old life in Lenox, — never, by any chance, of her
sad married years, — making pictures for him of each old
scene, till hills and trees and arching sky grew familiar
to his thought as to her own. Then, when the afternoon
began to grow chill, he would hurry them both
in again, — these two, whom he liked still to call his
patients.
So peacefully and blessedly August and September
went by. Elizabeth never stopped to think what gave
to this wine of life she was quaffing its so keen zest.
Sometimes, when she loved her baby most, and was
happiest in all its untold sweetness, an accusing prick of
conscience would bring the child's father to her mind, —
not as lover or husband of her own, not even as the
cool, cynical Mephistopheles of her life, but purely in
his aspect of the child's father, who had been defrauded
by her act of all these delights which made her own
heart so rich. But she tried to think that she had acted
for the best, and that Heaven itself, in giving her the
means of deliverance, had endorsed her course. Nor did
these conscience pricks come often to sting their pain
through her pleasure. For the most part she was entirely,
overflowingly happy, as she had never been
before, without thought or care for yesterday or to-morrow.
With October, the winds blowing down from the
North Sea grew chiller; and it was only now and then
into the garden. But still Dr. Erskine continued his
daily visits. Elizabeth declared that she was jealous,
because the baby stretched out her hands to go to him,
before she had ever accorded her a similar token of
preference. It was a very good-natured jealousy which
she felt, however; and somehow it gave a wonderful
brightness to her face.
One day the doctor insisted that she should go with
him for a ramble in the gardens of the Tuileries. Little
Marian would do excellently with Madame Ponsard,
he said; and Madame Nugent herself was certainly
suffering for a breath of fresh air.
“He has a right to command you,” Madame Ponsard
remarked while the question was pending. “But for
him neither you nor the child would be alive to-day.”
So Elizabeth tied on her bonnet and went, — the first
walk she had ever taken with Dr. Erskine.
They were very silent, as they wandered round the
grand old gardens which Le Nôtre laid out in the seventeenth
century, — Le Nôtre, whose dust long ago, let
us hope, blossomed in roses. They went on till they
came to Coustou's Venus, and sat down on the old stone
bench near at hand, to look at that vision of sculptured
grace. Then, at last, Dr. Erskine said, — “The time
is nearly come at which I purposed to return to
America.”
Elizabeth felt a curious sensation of chill, though the
October sun was shining. Just then the band began to
play some slow, sad music. The time came afterwards
she seemed to see again those stately gardens, to look
at Coustou's statue, and to hear the slow, sad music
play, and Dr. Erskine's voice telling her it was almost
time for them to part. It was the first time she had
realized that he and she and Madame Ponsard, and the
baby they all loved, were not to go on eternally, just
as they had been going on for the swift, short two
months which lay behind her. She drew a sharp
breath, but she did not speak.
And the band played, and the October sun shone, and
the prophetic wind blew from the north through all the
trees, and after a while Dr. Erskine spoke again.
“I have no right, I know, to ask the question, but if
you feel towards me enough like a friend to give me
your confidence, will you tell me just this one thing, —
was your marriage a happy one?”
“No.”
She could not have spoken another word. She wondered
how that one had got itself said through the
chill that was stiffening her lips and turning her heart
to stone.
After a little space, Dr. Erskine's voice came to her,
low, clear, and yet, as it seemed, from far away, — “If
you had said yes, I should not have told you what I am
going to tell you now. I love you very dearly. I am
thirty-eight years old, and I never loved a woman before.
I should not have dared to say this to you if I
had thought there was nothing but a grave between
you and a man whom you had loved. But, if you have
can. I will. Do you believe me?”
Did she believe him? Oh, God, did she not believe
him? Had her punishment overtaken her? — for now
she felt that in fleeing from Fate she had failed to
evade Responsibility, or escape Retribution. She made
a strong effort, and forced her lips to articulate the
words which almost refused to come.
“I must not hear another word. I have no right.”
“No right?”
“No, for my husband is not dead. I am still the
wife of Marian's father.”
She was frightened at the look his face took on, —
such a look as she had never seen a man's face wear
before. She made haste to tell him her story, — briefly
as she could, but not sparing herself, or withholding
any thing of the truth. And meantime the children
wandered round with their bonnes, fashionable ladies
passed with their cavaliers, — the autumn sun shone,
the autumn wind blew, and the slow, sad music played.
When all was told, she looked timidly up into his
face. Heavens! how sweet hers was! the dark eyes
full of passionate appeal, the scarlet lips trembling.
He was almost mad enough to kiss those lips then and
there, — to tell her there was no law on earth so
potent as that law of the soul which gave them to
each other. Into the turbulence of his mood her low,
pleading voice stole, — “Dr. Erskine, do you blame me
so very much? I was young, and I thought I cared
for him at first. Afterwards I know I ought to have
away. But my punishment has overtaken me.”
“Yours!” How his eyes kindled over her. “Is it
a punishment to you? Do you care?”
“Do you think I could give you pain, — you who
saved my life, and baby's, — and not care?”
“But for yourself, I mean. Elizabeth, have you any
heart?”
The swift color flushing the poor, pale face answered
him better than her low words, — “For myself I have
no right to care. I deserve any suffering that may
come; but you are blameless.”
“Tell me one thing, — just one. If you were free,
what then? Do you think I could have made you
happy?”
“You are cruel. I will not think. God help me,
I dare not.”
The last words were so low, his strained ears could
scarcely catch them. Just then Satan was tempting
him sorely. He had not needed to be taken into any
high mountain to see what for him would have outweighed
all the kingdoms of this world, and the glory
of them. He had never yet compromised with his conscience;
but he was trying to do it now.
“Why should she not be held free, in this new
world, from the old ties?” the Tempter was whispering.
“You saved her life. Have you then no claim on
it? Could you not make yourself a law to her soul?
Does she not love you enough to obey you? You love
her, — you would make her happy. That other man
— why should they not be put asunder? Are they
not more utterly asunder already than even Death
could ever make two who loved?”
He listened to these subtle whispers, coming gradually
to believe in them, till the music ceased to play, its
hour being over; till bonnes and children began to go
away, and then he got up and gave Madame Nugent
his arm.
As they walked, he said to her, — “Do you mean
ever to go back to the old ties?”
“Never!” she answered, upon her first impulse.
“Then, — old things having passed away, — why
should not all things become new? Elizabeth, you
think I saved your life. Give it for ever into my keeping.
You know how I will care for you and the child.
I think I have a right to you. Oh, my darling, my
darling, come and lay your destiny in my hands.”
She turned on him eyes dark with unutterable
woe. In her voice there was the faintest quiver of
reproach.
“It is not your best self which is speaking, Dr.
Erskine,” she said, mournfully. “I think you care for
me too much to tempt me, if you realized what you
were saying. I will never do any thing to make myself
unworthy to be Marian's mother; and, however we may
reason about the matter, the simple truth remains.
I am that man's wife, and no sophistry can make it
right for me to hear words of love from any other.”
She had uttered these sentences with an effort which
purpose. After they were spoken, the two walked
home in silence.
The next morning, a note was given to Elizabeth,
which contained only these words:—
“You were right, and I was wrong. I would not
tempt you to be other than you are, — the purest as the
fairest woman, in my eyes, whom God ever made.
I am running away, because I have not just now the
strength to stay here. You will not see me again for two
weeks. When I come back, I will be able to meet you
as I ought, and to prove myself worthy to be your
friend.
Elizabeth was weak or womanly enough to press
this note to her lips, in a sudden passion of love
and pain. Then she caught up her baby, and kissed
its soft, unconscious cheeks, talking her heart out to it,
as mothers do, — as she could not have done to any
one else on earth.
“Well, baby, dear, we must learn to do without him.
He will go away across the great, wide sea; and we
must be all the world to each other, you and I, — what
an empty world, when he is gone out of it.”
But either the sudden passion of her kisses frightened
the child, or the sadness of her voice saddened it,
— it burst into one of its infrequent fits of sobbing;
and Elizabeth, taught unselfishness by motherhood, as
women are, had to put aside her own pain, and comfort
her little one.
10. CHAPTER X.
DUST AND ASHES.
Did the tender lips which Heaven had sent Elizabeth
to “drain her sorrow dry,” draw from her the passionate
despair, the torturing unrest, of her mood at this
time? I have sometimes thought so.
While she was happy, the little one had grown and
flourished, — been a radiant incarnation of joy and delight.
Now, in these days when it seemed to the mother
as if all God's billows were passing over her, the child
began to droop. She was never like herself again after
Dr. Erskine went away. At first Madame Ponsard
said, laughingly, that the little angel missed the doctor.
But after a few days neither she nor any one else
laughed when they spoke of the baby.
From morning till night Elizabeth held the little
creature in her arms, watching the dark, questioning
eyes, fondling the thin, transparent fingers, kissing the
flushed yet wasting cheeks.
“Oh, if Dr. Erskine would but come back!” was all
the time the burden of her longing. He had saved that
little life once, — surely it must be, she thought, that
he could save it again. For herself no matter. She
knew now how easy it would have been to love him, —
how dangerously near she had come to being willing
to give up earth and Heaven for his sake, — and she
child was the swift and sudden retribution for this sin
of her soul. Oh, must this little innocent life pay the
penalty for her? If only the child could be saved,
she would go away with it somewhere, and never see
Dr. Erskine again, — never even think of him, if she
could help it.
Sometimes, in the midst of all this, her conscience
asked her whether the sin for which she was suffering
might not lie further back still. Had she not committed
it when she fled away secretly from the home
where God's Providence had set her feet, — the man to
whom she had promised to cleave till death parted
them? Well, she would do her best to atone now.
If only her baby could be spared, she would go back
and humble herself at her husband's feet. He should
have his child, if he would, — he should pass sentence
on her, and she would abide by it, — only let the baby
live.
It was the old Romish notion of buying Heaven
by sacrifice; and yet how naturally it comes to all of
us in moments of anguish. Let but this cup pass from
us, and we will drink any other, — only let it pass.
He was divine who, even in that first moment when
agony beyond human conception forced from His lips
this cry, added to it, — “Not my will, but thine be
done.” When this grace comes to mortals, it is the
rainbow after the storm is spent.
Little Marian had been sick a week, when, one
morning, Madame Ponsard looked at her more gravely
will not do to let this go on. Little Chérie is wasting
away.”
Elizabeth lifted her heavy, swollen eyes. “Is there
no way to send for Dr. Erskine? I do not think any
one else would help her.”
Madame went down to the concierge herself, in her
eagerness, and came back presently with slower
steps.
“He left no word where he was going. He said he
should be gone two weeks, and his letters must be kept
for him. I think we ought not to wait.”
“Send, then, for whomever you please. I believe
that no one else will do her any good; still we can try.
But you must make the strange doctor understand
plainly, in the first place, that he must give up the
case to Dr. Erskine, whenever he comes.”
And then, as madame went out of the room, she
burst into a low, heart-broken wail, — “He won't come,
he won't come. God means my little one to die. And
I have deserved it all.”
Half an hour afterwards, a chatty French doctor sat
watching Elizabeth's baby. He was heartily sorry for
the poor young mother, and was kind to her, after his
own lights. But he thought words would cheer her;
whereas they went nigh to drive her mad. At last
some cord snapped, and her weak nerves or her weak
patience gave way.
“I cannot bear talking,” she said, with a petulance
which held in it something touching. “Please only tell
and leave us alone.”
Good Dr. Bouffon was not disturbed. He hoped he
could make allowance for ladies' nerves, he told Madame
Ponsard afterwards. He answered Elizabeth with
a calmness which she found intensely exasperating.
“It is impossible to say, dear madame, — quite impossible.
She can never have been strong.”
“Oh, she has been the healthiest little creature,”
Madame Ponsard interposed.
Dr. Bouffon bowed.
“Exactly, but health is not always strength. As I
said, she could never have been strong. I have written
the prescription which I think the case needs. For the
result we must wait.”
Then he bowed himself out. Madame Ponsard followed
him, and Elizabeth sat holding her child alone.
Any other observer might not have considered its
illness quite unaccountable. A first tooth was swelling
its gums. A second summer had set in for a few days,
burning October with the pitiless suns of July. There
was a languor in the air which oppressed stronger constitutions.
But Elizabeth associated the occult malady
which was sapping the foundations of her darling's life
with none of these things. To her it seemed a direct
judgment from Heaven, — the execution of the sentence
eternal justice had pronounced upon her. She
lost sight of the beatific vision, which had once blessed
her soul; of a Father, loving even while He chastened;
and with something of a heathen's spirit, she set about
put out of her arms her baby, asleep now, and wrote to
Elliott Le Roy these words: —
“Your child was born the 28th of June. I did not
know of this which was to come when I left the shelter
of your roof, or I should not have gone. The little one
is very ill; and, feeling that she may not live, I think
it right to give you the opportunity of seeing her, if you
wish to, before she dies. Come, if you choose, to No.
50, Rue Jacob, and you will find her.
Then, when Madame Ponsard came back, she told
her story, and the contents of the letter which she
wished posted. Madame was surprised and a little
startled, but received the disclosure with the composure
and tact of a French woman, and began calling her
boarder Madame Le Roy as fluently as she had hitherto
called her Madame Nugent.
Now, Elizabeth thought, she had given up her own
will, — made the greatest sacrifice in her power. Now,
perhaps, destiny would relent. But the days passed
on, and brought with them no healing. The intense
heat went by. It was clear, beautiful October weather,
but still the child drooped, and daily the tiny hands
grew more waxen, and the blue veins showed more
clearly through the transparent temples.
On the afternoon of the fourteenth day, Dr. Erskine
walked into the room where Elizabeth sat, as usual,
holding her child. She lifted her languid eyes, but she
pulses. She felt in her soul that his coming was too
late. He stood beside her, silent as herself, looking
down at the child. Then he knelt, and counted its
pulse-beats.
“Madame told me she was ill,” he said, “but I did
not expect to see her like this. I shall never forgive
myself that I was not here to help you nurse her.”
“It might have done no good,” Elizabeth answered,
so drearily that it went to his heart. “I think God
meant her to die. It is my punishment. I have been
altogether wrong. But now I have done my best to
atone. A week ago I sent for him, — Marian's father.
He will be here in less than three weeks if he cares to
see her. Do you think we can keep her alive so long?”
She did not look at Dr. Erskine, or she would have
seen a tense white line round his lips, which would have
told her how he was suffering. He waited a moment
till he could speak calmly. Then he answered her.
“We will try. I dare not promise you that she will
get well. I think she is wasting away. She has your
highly wrought temperament, and I could have told
you that she never was strong.”
“So Dr. Bouffon said, but I did not believe him.
She has been so lovely.”
“Yes, and it was partly her very frailness that made
her so fair. But now you must give her up to me, and
take some rest. Go down into the garden, and get the
fresh air. Has there been no one to tell you how much
her well-being depended upon your health?”
She gave the child to him obediently. For days
Madame Ponsard had pleaded in vain to be allowed to
hold her, and Elizabeth had clung to her obstinately;
but it seemed another thing to trust her to Dr. Erskine.
Two weeks more went on, during which they watched
together over that ebbing life. They seldom spoke to
each other through this time; but now and then, out
of the anguish of Elizabeth's tortured heart, would be
wrung some cry which she would have suppressed before
any witness but him.
“If she could but have lived,” she would say sometimes,
“to speak to me, to call me mother just once, I
think I could bear it better.”
Once, in the bitterness of her despair, she cried, —
“Oh, if she were not quite so pure! If she had only
lived to be soiled ever so little by human sin, I might
hope to see her again, — but now she will go to the
highest heaven, and I can never find her in all eternity.”
To this Dr. Erskine made answer, or through him
some holier voice spoke, — “I think the highest heaven
is for those who have struggled and conquered, sinned
and repented, rather than for those who have been
spared alike all struggle and all pain. But I do not
believe whole eternities can separate a mother from her
child.”
There came a morning at last when the baby's eyes
did not open. Dr. Erskine felt the heart throb faintly
under his fingers, but he knew it was beating its last.
anticipated him.
“Doctor,” she said, — and her voice was so passionless
that it might almost have belonged to a disembodied
spirit, — “I know that my darling is dying.”
He bowed his head mutely. Her very calmness
awed him.
“Is there any thing you can do to ease her?”
“Nothing. I do not think she suffers.”
“Then will you please to go away? She is mine, —
nobody's but mine, in her life and in her death, and I
want her quite to myself at the last.”
Sorrowfully enough he left her.
Elizabeth held her child closely, but gently. She
thought in that hour that she had never loved any thing
else, — never in this world should love any thing again.
She wanted to cry, but her eyes were dry and burning,
and not a tear fell on the little upturned face, changing
so fast to marble. She bent over, and whispered something
in the baby's ear, — a wild, passionate prayer that
it would remember her, and know her again in the infinite
spaces. A look seemed to answer her, — a radiant,
loving look, which she thought must be born of the near
heaven. She pressed her lips in a last despairing agony
of love to the little face, from which already, as she
kissed it, the soul had fled. Her white wonder had
gone home. This which lay upon her hungry heart
was stone.
An hour afterward Dr. Erskine went in, and saw the
motionless mother holding to her breast the motionless
together.
But when he went up to take the child from her
arms, Elizabeth clung to it with a passionate clasp.
With infinite gentleness he entreated her to go out into
the cool, reviving air, and leave for awhile her dead
darling to the ministrations of Madame Ponsard. She
obeyed him, in a patient, passive way, as if because to
obey was less trouble than to resist; and he made her
go down into the old summer-house. She sat there in
utter silence, for an hour, conscious, as it seemed, of
nothing which surrounded her, least of all of the tender
pity in his watching face.
At last Madame Ponsard came down, and made a
sign to him, and he got up and spoke to Elizabeth.
“Come, now,” he said, “you may go back to the
baby.”
Her face lightened a little, and she got up and followed
him.
The dead little queen of the Rue Jacob lay on her
own tiny bed, made all fresh and sweet for her reception.
She was robed in her richest garments, heavy
with lace and embroidery, and in her hand was clasped a
half-opened white rose-bud, as pure and pale as herself.
Elizabeth looked at her, and then turned to Madame
Ponsard and Dr. Erskine, with such entreaty in her
face, as brought the tears to both their eyes.
“Indeed,” she said, “I am not ungrateful, but I shall
have her such a little, little while. Mayn't I stay with
her all alone?”
And so they both went out.
Once or twice, during the day, Madame Ponsard
carried her something to eat or drink, and she took it
with a sort of weary and patient submission, which
was inexpressibly pitiful. Save for these brief interruptions,
she sat all day quite alone with her dead.
At night Madame Ponsard went to her with a question.
It was grievous to Madame's kind heart to see
this silent anguish, which neither words or tears relieved,
and which was so foreign to her own nature.
She thought, if once the baby could be buried out of
sight, Madame Le Roy would be able to cry, and by
and by to grow cheerful once more. So she went to
ask whether she should make arrangements for the
funeral to-morrow or the day after.
The question roused Elizabeth.
“Not to-morrow,” she answered, “and not the day
after. I have sent for her father to see her. I will
wait, and give him time. Let me keep her as long as
I can. She was all I had.”
So through the night, as through the day, she kept
her solitary vigil.
The next morning Dr. Erskine came to her. There
were the traces on his face of a conflict with himself,
but his words to Elizabeth were few.
“I am going into Brittany for a few weeks. I think
it is best.”
“I think it is,” she answered, drearily.
“Good-by, Elizabeth.”
“Good-by.”
The hand she laid for an instant in his was cold as
death. No pulse quickened at his clasp, and she turned
from him, as if even so few words had wearied her, to
look again at the still face, the little dark-lashed eyes
that would never open, the frozen lips that her kisses
could never warm.
Dr. Erskine turned, and looked also, for a few silent
moments, at the dead little queen he had loved so well,
and served so faithfully. Then he stooped down, and
pressed his lips to the tiny, stirless face, and was
gone.
Elizabeth scarcely knew it when he went out of the
room. For the time her passion of woe had absorbed
every other emotion, save the one grim thought which
would not be absorbed, — that Le Roy might be almost
there, — that she was waiting for her Judge.
And so for two days more she sat there, — her arms
empty, her heart faint with its hunger, her future so
near that she seemed to feel an icy blast of its air.
11. CHAPTER XI.
A GATE OF FLAME AND A GATE OF FLOOD.
Toward noon of the third day after the baby died,
Madame Ponsard came to Elizabeth, and asked her to
go for a moment into her sitting-room. With a shiver
running through every limb, Elizabeth got up and
Elliott Le Roy. She waited for him to speak.
The soulless gallantry which had stung her so often
was gone in this crisis, from his manner; replaced,
indeed, by a half-brutal hardness, which yet hurt her
less than his mocking courtesy would have done.
“I came to see my child,” he said.
It never entered Elizabeth's mind to spare him any
shock, — she had always thought of him as without the
capacity for feeling one. So she silently led the way
to her own room, and pointed to the bed.
He looked for an instant at the little bit of pulseless
marble lying there, with the white rose of peace in the
sculptured fingers. Then she saw him grow white to
the lips, and heard his cry, full of an awful passion of
longing, —
“Dead! dead! Oh, God! my little child!”
She understood then, that even this heart of stone
held the instinct of fatherhood. He could have loved
his child.
She stole away noiselessly.
Whether he wept or cursed she never knew. When
he came out, half an hour afterward, he was his hard,
cold, mocking self again.
He asked a few questions regarding the time and
manner of the baby's death; then went away to make
the arrangements for its burial, which he communicated
to Elizabeth in a brief note.
She did not see him again till he came next day to
go with her to Pére la Chaise. They took the casket
carriage which headed the short funeral cortége. They
two, — alone at last with each other and the dead.
But during all the drive neither of them spoke. Elizabeth
was calm. It seemed to her that a mortal chill
had hushed all the unrest and passion of her nature, —
that she should never cry again, or smile, or care for
any thing which went on around her.
But just at the last, when they were lowering her
darling into the grave, when she heard the English
minister say, solemnly, — “Earth to earth, dust to
dust, ashes to ashes,” she felt all this impassive coldness
break up suddenly, and heedless of every thing but the
little lump of clay, which she could never, never see
again, she sank down beside the grave, and sobbed till
she could sob no longer, and they lifted her up and put
her into the second carriage of the small procession,
where Madame Ponsard received her in her kind
arms, and supported her all the way home, comforting
and soothing her as only one kind woman can soothe
and comfort another.
Le Roy went back in his own carriage, vis-a-vis with
Monsieur Ponsard, who had left his wife to make
room for Elizabeth, — went back, as he had come, in
grim silence.
The next morning he came early to the old house
in the Rue Jacob, and went into Elizabeth's sitting-room.
He spoke to her with quiet decision.
“You will have to pack to-day; for we must leave at
six this evening for Havre. A steamer sails to-morrow,
and I have telegraphed to secure our places.”
Elizabeth looked at him in blank wonder.
“Am I going back with you?” she asked.
“It appears to me to be the only thing for you to do,
Mrs. Le Roy. Remember our marriage has not been
dissolved. It binds us still, though its sole fruit is dust
and ashes.”
Elizabeth had made up her mind, beforehand, to
submit herself to his judgment. She had found that
for her freedom was not safety, even though she prayed
every night not to be led into temptation. But now
that the crisis had come, the struggle to submit was
harder than she had expected. Every pulse was in
mutiny. Still she offered no resistance; except that
once she asked him if it would not embarrass him to
take her back among his friends.
“Not in the least,” he answered, coolly. “Not one
of them suspects that your absence was without my
knowledge and consent; or supposes me ignorant of
any of your movements.”
The man's cool mastery over circumstances astonished
Elizabeth into another question.
“What did you tell them?”
“That an excellent opportunity presented itself during
my absence for you to travel with some friends of
your own, and as your health was not good, I had
written to you to accept it.”
“But the servants?”
“Thanks to your silence, they knew nothing, and I
think they would scarcely have cared to retail their
conjectures at the expense of my displeasure.”
“But you did not know that you could ever find me,”
she said at last, amazed at his audacity.
Le Roy smiled the cold, glittering, cynical smile she
remembered so well. An evil gleam of triumph shot
from his pitiless eyes.
“I traced Madame Nugent without difficulty as soon
as I returned from Cuba. I should have come for
you, in any case, when I thought it time for you to
return.”
She had called this man the Mephistopheles of her
life before; but never with such good reason as now,
when he stood in front of her, smiling his mocking smile,
exulting scornfully in his easy triumph. He had said
once that he should hold on to her like fate, — and now
she knew that she had never yet been entirely out of
his power. Why should she engage in any vain struggle
against his will?
From the very beginning of their homeward journey,
destiny seemed to oppose itself to them, bringing to its
aid all the perversity of inanimate things. A railroad
accident, not serious, but most annoying, made their
journey to Havre fifteen hours long, instead of six, so
that when they reached their destination, towards noon
on the fifteenth, the American steamer had been gone
three hours.
Le Roy took Elizabeth to a hotel, where a fresh-colored
maid, wearing a high Norman cap, brought
her coffee, and went out himself to reconnoitre. He
came in, half an hour afterwards, with his morning
paper in his hand.
“There will be no other steamer from here till the
first of next month,” he said.
“Are we to wait here, or go back to Paris?” Elizabeth
asked, feeling like a foot-ball which he and destiny
were knocking back and forth between them, and
waiting passively for the next push.
“Neither. My first thought was to go to Liverpool,
and take the first Cunarder from there; but I see by a
telegraphic despatch in the Messenger, that a steamer
which left Hamburg last evening will stop at Southampton.
We can sail for there to-night, after a day's
rest here, and catch this German steamer for New
York. Does this plan meet your approval, Mrs. Le
Roy?”
“All plans are alike to me,” Elizabeth answered,
wearily. “If we are going to take the German steamer,
may I telegraph to Madame Ponsard? She made me
promise to send her word of my arrival here if I could.
She thought we were going in the Fulton; and she will
want to look out for news of us.”
“Gratify your sentimental friend, by all means,” Le
Roy said, with a little sneer. “Write your dispatch,
and I will see that it is sent.”
Elizabeth wrote: —
“We were too late for the Fulton, and are going to
Southampton to take the German steamer from Hamburg.
Good-by.”
She did not know why she said good-by over again
by telegraph, — she certainly did not believe in presentiments,
her, for which she did not try to account.
The next day, at Southampton, they went on board
the German steamer, which set sail at quite a late hour
in the afternoon. A heavy mist settled down with the
twilight, and it was considered advisable to anchor the
vessel between the Isle of Wight and the main-land.
Early next morning they weighed anchor again, and in
the process one of the crew lost his life. Owing to
some mismanagement, the anchor ran out, whirling the
capstan round with terrific force, and hurling the men
in all directions. One was thrown overboard, and was
supposed to have been instantly killed, as he never rose
to the surface. This accident cast a gloom over the
officers and crew, which any one familiar with the
superstitions of the sea would readily understand.
“He's gone down below to tell 'em we're all comin',”
one white-lipped sailor said to another; and the shadow
fell upon them all. They were silent and depressed for
days, though every thing seemed to promise a prosperous
voyage.
Once at sea, and the confusion and excitement of
embarkation over, Elizabeth settled into a strange, sad
calm. Her presentiment of evil, though she had not
forgotten it, ceased in any degree to absorb her
thoughts. Every day, and all the day, she sat motionless
and silent on the deck, looking into the troubled
sea, or equally motionless and silent in her state-room.
But everywhere she looked, into yeasty waves, or empty
air, she saw one face only, — her child's. Madame
Dr. Erskine himself came sometimes into the picture of
which this face was the centre, but only as accessories
to it. They seemed blank of human significance to her
as the angles of a wall.
Of only one thing besides that face was she intensely
conscious, and that was of Le Roy, — that he, her
keeper, was breathing the same air with her, was carrying
her home. How mad she had been ever to think
that she could escape him. She wondered if through
all eternity he would be beside her, and she should see
for ever that face of pitiless power and mocking scorn.
But it was very seldom that he came near her; and
when they had been eight days at sea they had hardly
spoken as many words to each other, beyond those
demanded in the presence of others by the ordinary
small courtesies of life.
On the afternoon of the ninth day, Elizabeth had
come out of the state-room, and was standing quite by
herself, looking into the surging autumn sea, but seeing
only the one small face which for her filled sea and sky.
After a while she heard a wild and awful shriek, —
the cry of fire, — horrible anywhere, but most unearthly
and hideous in its horror far out at sea, when the flames
are burning the one plank betwixt you and death.
By whom the cry was started, no one knew, but
hundreds of voices took it up, and swelled it to a yell
of madness and despair. A dense volume of smoke
burst from the steerage, and then the flames broke
through the lights, and leaped and crackled along the
deck.
That first shriek had roused Elizabeth to something
which was scarcely terror, — awful expectation, rather.
Her foreboding was realized. Death was at last waiting
for her. She had tasted the apple of life and found it
bitter. What next?
She did not join in the wailing which went up to the
unheeding sky. She no longer seemed to see the face
of her little child. It had vanished like a vision. She
looked down still into the sea, but she saw something
else. Face to face with death, she seemed strangely
enough to be living over again an hour of most intense
and thrilling life. An October afternoon came back to
her so vividly, that she seemed not to be standing on a
burning ship, betwixt pitiless sky and pitiless sea; but
sitting in a fair French garden, near Coustou's Venus,
while the autumn sun shone, and the autumn wind blew,
and the slow, sad music played, and through it all she
heard Dr. Erskine's voice saying things which she had
no right to hear. It was all so sweet, and sad, and
wrong, — and now death was waiting for her.
How much had she sinned, she wondered. Was she
past hoping for Heaven? God knew all, — temptation
and sin and struggle, — God knew. Through all her
turmoil and unrest, that thought filled her soul with a
great calm. Simply as a child she said her prayer.
“Oh, God! oh, Father! suffer not my soul to perish!
Take me home by flame or flood, as Thou wilt, but take
me home!”
Meantime, a wild panic, of which she was altogether
unconscious, had swept through the ship. From the
lost at the weighing of the anchor, a secret terror had
ruled the hearts of officers and crew. Now, with the
first alarm, all presence of mind forsook them. The man
at the wheel left his post, and the vessel being head to
the wind, the flames swept back over her with awful
rapidity. The captain was among the first to lose his
self-command. Mad with panic terror, he attempted,
forsaking all, to lower himself into a boat, and missing
his foothold, was swept away. Then the wildest confusion
began to reign. Boats were lowered, and some
of them swamped in the very act of lowering. Those
rushed into them who could, while others jumped into
the sea, to escape the swift, hot pursuit of the flames.
At last Le Roy came to Elizabeth. He had been
calm and clear-sighted through it all, waiting his opportunity.
Now, as he thought, he saw it. A boat only
partly filled, lay under the davits, on one side.
“Come,” he said, pulling her along with him, swiftly.
He took a cloak from his own shoulders, and wrapped
it round her, then lowered her from the vessel, and she
was in the boat almost before she knew it. She looked
back for him. He had stood aside for two more
women. The officer in charge of the boat shouted, —
“Keep off! We are full! another man would swamp
us!” and at a sign from him, the men caught up their
oars.
Just as, in defiance of the officer's warning shout, Le
Roy was swinging himself down, the boat rocked away,
and he touched the waves instead.
In an instant Elizabeth saw that white, satirical face,
which seemed to mock even at death, looking up at
her, with an awful light upon it, from the surging, fire-lit
sea.
“Oh, save him! save him! for the love of God!” she
cried, penetrated at last with the very passion and madness
of terror, for that other life, not for her own. But
no one noticed her cry. The rowers pulled away rapidly,
and Elliott Le Roy went down, — as the captain
had gone down before, — as hundreds of souls went
down that awful day.
The engineers had been smothered at their posts
among the first, so the steamer was going on all this
time, at a rate of eight or ten knots an hour, as if she
were trying to escape from the flames of her own burning.
She was an awful beacon, — a great, towering holocaust.
The boat which held Elizabeth, pulled with all
the might of its rowers in her wake. It was their best
chance for a rescue; for she was a signal-fire of distress
the like of which has seldom been kindled.
Still Elizabeth was calm and silent, but with all her
faculties fully alive, — ready to live or die, as God
willed, — anxious only, whether in life or death, to be
in His keeping.
She should be glad, she felt, through all eternity, that
Le Roy's last act toward her had been one of unselfish
kindness. If she had any thing to forgive, she could
forgive it all for the sake of that one moment. She
had not loved him, nor he her; but, now that he was
and began to look at him again in the old light, — to
remember his power and exalt his strength, and see
him master of circumstance, yielding only to destiny.
So the doomed steamer went on, grander spectacle
in her death than she had ever been in her life; and
the boat, with its dozen souls, pulled after her; till, just
as night was settling down, the little company, faint
with thirst and spent with rowing, saw a ship under
full sail approaching the burning vessel, and rowed
toward her with a strength renewed by hope. In an
hour they got within hailing distance, and before the
night had quite closed round them she had taken them
on board.
The ship proved to be a French barque, taking a
cargo from Newfoundland to the Isle of Bourbon.
During the night sixty souls were received on board
of her. Elizabeth looked anxiously at every one, to see
if, by some Providence, the sea might not have given
up its prey, but all were strangers. She thought then
that she would have laid down her own sad life with
unutterable content, but to see again in safety one
face which had looked its last at her from the yeasty
sea.
But Elliott Le Roy had gone down, with all the rest
whom that day, by those gates of Flame and of Flood,
Death led into the Land of the Hereafter.
12. CHAPTER XII.
FACE TO FACE.
No trace remained next morning of the fated steamer.
The sky was as coolly blue as if no fierce flames had
ever kindled a great funeral pyre below it. The sea
was tranquil. The day was still. The officers of the
French barque, seeing that they had done all they could,
set sail for Fayal, intending to leave there the rescued
passengers. But before that day was over they fell in
with another barque, bound for Halifax, to which as
many as could be accommodated were transferred, and
among them Elizabeth.
So it came about that before Christmas her wanderings
were over, and she went back again, a widow, indeed,
and utterly free now, into that house from which
she had fled to secure her freedom.
The excitement through which she had passed had
roused her effectually from the apathy which had succeeded
to the death of her little child, and which, otherwise,
might not improbably have found its termination
in insanity. She was in full possession of all her
powers, — a sad woman, the colors of whose life had
faded, but a woman who was mistress of herself.
She communicated to Mrs. Murray Le Roy's death,
and the manner of it, leaving her to inform the rest of
the household. Then she sent for her husband's man
could, all the business details for which her presence
would be desirable, as she wished to leave New York
at the earliest possible moment.
The time had come to her now, she thought, when
indeed she was done with life, and ready to go back to
Lenox, and wait for death under those skies. She felt
no desire to see any of the old faces; but her memories
of the lonely, lovely hills appealed to her irresistibly.
She thought she had tasted all the keen delights or
sharp pangs which this life held for her; and now she
longed only for rest. She wrote to Lawyer Mills, requesting
him to secure for her a residence as near to
her old home as possible; and learned, in reply, that
the old home itself would be for sale in the spring.
The youngest of the “three Graces,” her cousin Emmie,
would be married in February, and the widowed mother
wished to give up housekeeping, and reside alternately
with her daughters. So she began to look forward
with homesick longing to the sheltered nook which the
hills shut in, where she meant to pass the evening of her
days, — this woman who fancied herself so old at twenty-five,
that Hope and she had parted company for ever.
Sometimes, during those months, her thoughts went
back to the old house in the Rue Jacob. Madame Ponsard
would read of the destruction of the ill-fated steamer
in which she had sailed, and believe her to be dead.
That was best. She felt no inclination to write, and
undeceive her. It was better to be dead to that old
life, — dead as her youth was, and her heart within her.
presently; though, to be sure, she would never forget
her or the baby. Elizabeth knew if she should go back
to Paris, after ten years had gone, she would find immortelles
on little Chérie's grave, which madame would
have hung there with pious care, — madame, who, childless
herself, had loved that baby face so well. Still
madame would be hearty, and healthy, and merry, and
French.
And Dr. Erskine, — but she always stopped there,
and told herself that she had no right to think of him
at all. Of course, he would outgrow the old past,
which had been only pain at its happiest, and love and
woo some more fortunate woman; and that was best,
too.
She was content; but, oh, the difference between
that content which is born of resignation, and that
other which is the paradise-flower of hope.
And so the winter wore away, and the spring, — and,
at last feeling herself, with her share of her husband's
fortune, quite too rich for her modest needs, Elizabeth
went back to Lenox, and took possession of the old
home, the purchase of which Lawyer Mills had in the
mean time arranged for her.
She entered its doors, as it chanced, on the last day
of May, the seventh anniversary of that day on which
she had first met Elliott Le Roy. “Only seven years!”
she said to herself, as this memory came back to her, —
only seven years, and in them she had weighed the
world, love, life, in her balances, and found them all
no sheaves with her.
The summer came to her there, in the old home,
— the brilliant New England summer, with its long,
blue days, its flush of roses and flow of streams; the
autumn, with its ripe fruits, and prophetic winds, and
the haze upon all its hills; the long, white winter, keen
and cold as death; and then the spring came again, and
the summer.
This space had been for Elizabeth a time of healing.
Its quiet had fallen upon her soul like a benediction.
She had lived almost in solitude. The old friends who
called on her could find no fault with the gentle courtesy
with which she welcomed them; but she made her
deep mourning an excuse for not returning their visits,
and they did not feel free to repeat them. For the most
part she was alone with Nature; and I think the dear
old mother seldom fails to comfort the tired children
who lean close upon her breast.
Insensibly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, Elizabeth
grew towards peace; until, when the second summer
came, she had begun to feel that her days were
good days, — that there was a positive, pure joy in
being alive, — alive where one could feel the sunshine,
and hear the birds, and gather the roses. There were
some keener delights in life, for which her hour was
passed; but, just as they were, her days were not barren
of enjoyment.
She thought a great deal about her little child; but
now her thoughts of it were among her sweetest consolations.
sea for the little casket under the sods of Pére la
Chaise, and bury it anew, where she could go often
and stand above it in the long and pleasant grass. But
as her health of mind and body began to be restored,
she ceased to wish for this. She thought less of the bit
of marble she had buried, with the white rose of peace
frozen in its sculptured fingers, and more of the immortal
little one, — alive, and free, and still her own, —
still near her, perhaps; for she remembered and believed
what Dr. Erskine had said, that whole eternities
could not separate a mother from her child.
She thought, too, very often of Dr. Erskine, — for
now she believed herself able to think of him unselfishly
and abstractly. I told you, long ago, that this
Elizabeth of mine did not understand herself; and all
the experiences through which she had passed had still
left her on the very threshold of self-knowledge. She
thought, — because she never expected to see John
Erskine again, or hear any words from his lips, and, so
expecting, yet found that skies were blue, and birdsongs
sweet, and summer days pleasant, and life had
not lost all its savor, — that the old past in which she
had felt so much for him was as dead as a dead day.
She honestly believed herself capable of seeing him
again without an extra heart-beat, — and I rather think
she would have liked to try the experiment.
He, meantime, was daring to love her, because he
believed that she was dead. He knew of the destruction
of the ill-starred German steamer, and the loss of almost
never met his eye; and he thought that Le Roy and
Elizabeth had gone up together, through flame and
flood, to stand at God's bar of judgment, for the final
solving of the sad problem of their lives.
How far Elizabeth had been wrong, he did not know
or question. He only knew that, whether her faults
were great or small, she was for him the one woman in
the wide universe of souls; and to that knowledge he
trusted, as to a sure pledge, that he should find her
again in some life, some world. So that all the living
women on the earth, with all their smiles, their cheeks
of tempting bloom, their lips ripe for kisses, were less
to him than the memory of one sweet, sad face, with
dark eyes which had never answered his pleading, and
lips which he had never kissed.
He had staid in Paris for a year, after he returned
from Brittany and found that Elizabeth had left with
her husband, and the ship in which they sailed had gone
down. He had not the courage, at first, to go back,
and take up the burden of American work-a-day life;
so he lingered on, in the French capital, until his mood
changed, and he began to long for work as a means for
his own healing. Then he went home; and through
the winter and spring found himself full of business. A
friend — the old Boston physician, with whom he had
studied his profession — took advantage of his return
to visit Europe himself, leaving his practice in Dr.
Erskine's hands. So the Doctor was both busy and
prosperous.
When the summer came, however, he was comparatively
at leisure. Almost all of Dr. Gordon's patients
went away to sea-side or mountains; and Dr. Erskine
found himself able to take a few days of vacation for his
own pleasure. He used them to make a pilgrimage.
Ever since his return, he had been longing to go to
Lenox. His fancy was haunted by the pleasant pictures
Elizabeth had made of it in the summer afternoons
when she sat in the old garden of the Rue Jacob, her
sleeping child upon her knees, while he watched and
listened, — thinking then that she would be his, some
day.
Now, it seemed to him that, if souls could come back
to earth, hers would walk among those hills she had
loved so well. He almost fancied he should see her, a
radiant ghost, — a slight, swift shape, with pale, fair
face, and luminous eyes, and hair of silken dusk, — the
Elizabeth he had loved and lost. So he went to
Lenox.
He left the cars at the railroad station in the village,
and then walked across the fields by himself. He would
not ask his way. He thought he could find the old
Fordyce place, and know it from Elizabeth's descriptions.
Presently the roomy old house rose before him,
— the tall trees in front making a leafy darkness, the
grassy pathway leading up from the gate to the front
doorstone. He was sure that he had found the spot.
Just so had Elizabeth described it. Just so, many a
time, had it risen before his fancy, and he had pictured
her, a gentle, serious child, going about under those
with her book.
The sun had just set. He turned to look at the
clouds that kindled the west, and to wonder where,
beyond them, she was, — his love.
Somehow the thought of her death had never much
dwelt with him. He had never lingered morbidly over
her possible sufferings. By flood or flame the agony had
been short, doubtless; and he knew her well enough to
believe the release had been welcome. He had loved,
instead, to think of her as gone home, — translated into
the sure refuge of God's peace, — her little one again
in her arms, perhaps, as she sat among the heavenly
gardens, where the very flowers of Eden made sweet
the celestial air. Thinking of her thus to-night, as he
had so often done before, the vision became very real to
him, and he was scarcely surprised to see it taking form
before him, as he turned back again to look at the old
house.
Down towards the gate a shape was coming, like one
he used to know, walking dreamily, and lifting its rapt
face towards the sunset sky. He hardly dared to
breathe as he drew near and watched this miracle of
resurrection. Scarcely knowing what he did, he spoke
at last one word, — “Elizabeth.”
The uplifted eyes came back to earth. The dreamy
footsteps paused. A heavenly smile curved the lips.
A soft blush rose to the rounded cheeks. Do ghosts
then blush and smile? He went forward, trembling
with strange ecstasy, and they were face to face.
He touched the extended hand. The soft and slender
fingers which trembled in his own were flesh and blood
surely. The red lips, “dear and dewy,” the eyes shy
and sweet, — this was no ghost, no vision.
“I thought you were dead,” he said.
“And I thought I should never see you again till we
were both immortal,” she answered.
Then there was a silence, which John Erskine broke
at last; though his voice was hoarse with some secret
struggle, as he asked, — “Were you both saved, — you
and he?”
“He was taken and I was left,” she said, slowly.
“God knows why. My husband saved my life. He
lowered me into the boat, and lost his own chance. We
had both been wrong in our lives; but he was noble in
his death.”
“And you have been free all this time, — alive and
free? Why did you never let me know? Did you
never once think that your life belonged to me now?”
“I dared not think so. You know what I believed.
I thought my darling was taken from my arms because
I sinned, in those days, in caring for you too much; and
it seemed to me God would be best pleased by my living
out my life alone.”
“And you meant to offer Him your own sad, solitary
future, and mine, as a sacrifice of expiation? Oh, Elizabeth!”
“I meant only to offer Him mine. I thought you
would be happy with some one else.”
John Erskine's face kindled with a grand light.
“Child,” he said, “I should have waited for you, —
no matter through how many lives or worlds, — sure
through them all that you would be mine at the
last.”
Then, for a moment more, he looked at her, in all
her shadowy loveliness, and after that look some gust
of emotion swayed him from his calm. His words were
strong with a passion whose power startled her.
“Did you forget that our Father in Heaven pities
us, as a Father pities his children? He wants to
see us happy, believe it. You are mine, — my wife.
Flame and flood spared you, because you were for me.
Do you think I will give you up now?”
He took her into his arms, shy and startled, trembling
like a girl of sixteen before her lover. Her very agitation
calmed him, and he let her go before he had even
kissed her lips.
“You shall come to me of your own free will, or not
at all,” he said, gently. “I called you mine, — are you
mine, Elizabeth?”
Through the dusk which had gathered round them,
she felt rather than saw his ardent, longing look. The
moon, a pale crescent, was already high in the heavens,
and one star glittered beside it. A late bird, going
home, dropped a note full of hope and joy into the
heart of the fragrant, dewy night. Half unconsciously
she noted moon, and star, and bird-song, and the tender
fragrance of the summer dusk. Had every thing believed
and rejoiced in the Father's love except her
heart, — and now had her hour come? Was her life at
Erskine, close into the arms that once more shut her
in, — not passionately now, but gently, thankfully,
with a clasp that claimed, and accepted, and would
never again let her go.
| Some women's hearts | |